I did not want to make this a thematic story only for Serbia, because I wanted to express some feelings about the world we live in today,” he raises. But I am also talking about the world in general. “The film is related to Serbia, because I am from Serbia, and I am talking about Serbian problems. Vukmir’s frustrated calls for a collective spiritual awakening – “The whole fucking country is one big shitty kindergarten! A bunch of kids discarded by their parents!” – would not be out of place at one of the nationalist rallies that popped up around Belgrade in the years before the horror of the Balkans wars.ĭragojevic insists his message is more universal.
Speaking of Serbia, students of history may see echoes of the late President Milošević in the charismatic and deranged Vukmir, and the Faustian bargain of redemption and greatness he offers Miloš.
A small and conservative country is always the worst kind of censorship.” Even with that kind of situation, we didn’t find any distributors or theatres willing to have anything to do with this film. “After the whole job was done we started to see if we could exhibit it in Serbia, because in Serbia there are no official censorship laws. And then, even after the whole film was done they said: ‘we cannot deliver you the print, I’m sorry, you have to leave’,” he recalls. Even if we showed them the film first, we asked them ‘would you be willing and able to do this?’ and they said okay, they accepted. “The same thing happened again in Budapest. Unfortunately, the Germans are once again burning artistic work that they disagree with.” They did the whole job and then didn’t want to give us back our materials. We wanted to blow up it up on 35mm tape in Munich.
“First of all, we had problems with post-production with some film houses in Europe, in the so-called free world. According to Dragojevic, it’s also lucky it was ever released. A Serbian Film has been banned in three countries, refused classification in Australia and been subjected to the most egregious kinds of Murdoch tabloid hysteria in the UK. Let’s consider the consequences, all the same. To me, my whole project was to make an absolutely honest and strong film without compromise and without any concern about consequences.” “At that point the film was the most precious and most important thing to me and I didn’t want to make any mistakes by thinking about the wrong sorts of people or the audience reaction. “When I was making the film, the only thing I was thinking about was the film itself,” explains director Srđan Dragojevic. The film tells the story of retired pornographer Miloš, who is goaded into one last film with the promise of an obscene payout by eccentric director Vukmir, only to be drugged and trapped against his will in a horrific spectacle of necrophilia, paedophilia, murder and mutilation.