HAMLET

Even after 400 years, Shakespeare’s famous drama seems as fresh as ever in this adaptation in which Hamlet is a young Romany. The castles of the original are now makeshift huts on a vast refuse dump not far from Belgrade. Two Roma clans – one Orthodox, the other Muslim – are fighting over the rights to divide up the garbage. It is a hard winter there, on the fringes of modern Serbia, and the inhabitants resemble their environment: mean, intolerant, fraudulent. When his brother dies, Jova marries the dead man’s widow Jelena and takes control of the scrap distribution. But the vengeful ghost of the deceased brother is haunting the dump. Hamlet, the dead man’s son, discovers that his uncle Jova was responsible for the accident, and trains his hate-filled sights on the new boss. Nobody survives the tragedy that ensues. The film’s slow rhythm and neo-realistically atmospheric images convey an authentically hard-edged picture of shantytown Roma life on the sidelines of Serbian society. This authenticity is underscored by the fact that all characters are played by lay actors whose background mostly differs little from that shown in the film. Many of the film crew came from a similar environment. Shot from within the Roma community, therefore, it is a film in which the protagonists do not provide mere folkloric decoration but act in their own world and language.