This review has been ‘repurposed’ from my other site, theOneliner.com
Billed as a satirical documentary fairy tale, this Serbian outing is a very odd beast indeed. Saying it has a narrative is something of a stretch, as it’s more of a loosely linked and at sixty-odd minutes a fairly short series of aphorisms from an unseen narrator overlaid on a background of news footage of the Serbian conflicts, and shots of the still ravaged lands and people.
The world-weary narrator presents perhaps the most cynical view of authoritarianism and human nature, which is fairly understandable given the turmoil inflicted on the region by the Balkan conflicts. The visual footage will bounce around between genuinely harrowing images and some absolutely absurd ones, so while effective it’s welcome to have a consistently downbeat, jaundiced and amusing narrator anchoring it all together.
While there’s not an awful lot of insight brought to the events in either present or past Serbia, it does say a lot (rightly or wrongly) about a culture that copes by coming up with these almost uniformly great and funny aphorisms. It also deserves some respect as the only film I’ve ever seen with credits for aphorism consultants. Something of an oddball, but if you happen across it do not hesitate to give it a look.
The film’s website at Dribbling Pictures has the first five minutes available for you over there, at least as this goes to press, and is most certainly worth that amount of your time. Go to it, soldier.