Orkester

The state of cross-border togetherness isn't always as great as it seems after the fifth beer or seventh shot, and when the elders start to tell the same old jokes again the youngsters, just like the bus driver of Bosnian origin, end up feeling estranged from their Slovenian homeland. Director Matevž Luzar knows this from his own experience; the band in his film is the one with which he toured the villages himself for many years. The atmosphere is documentary-like and yet the situations are fictional. Luzar sets what is primarily a Slovenian milieu study in Austria, located somewhere between the black and white of Miloš Forman's “Firemen's Ball” and the bitter humour of Ulrich Seidl. Its main actress Marie Hofstätter, familiar to audiences from "Paradise", mops the floor expressionlessly whilst two Slovenian brass-band masters apologise to their Austrian host couple for having thrown up all over their house the night before in this forthright provincial portrait, told with the distance of a participating observer and the heart of a passionate fellow traveller.