LOST COUNTRY

Stefan's grandfather is a serving partisan who still today is convinced of Tito's communism and who named his daughter Marklena, a mixture of Marx and Lenin. His mother and grandfather look after Stefan with care, but it is clear what he should become: loyal. And for this purpose, some intrigues are hatched, election fraud and police violence against demonstrators are glossed over – and no one ever talks about war crimes in the Yugoslavian wars that have just ended. The fact that what the autocrat Slobodan Milošević has done to the country no longer has anything to do with communism remains unsaid. But the mutual affection in the family is real. At school, Stefan is bullied and beaten for his family background, and his best friends turn away from him. Stefan feels just as drawn to the protest movement “Zajedno” (Englisch: “Together”) as he does to a hug from his mother. In his second feature film, Vladimir Perišić revisits his own youth as the son of Milošević's culture minister. A teenager caught between the desperate self-deception of an arrogant elite with its back against the wall and the blind rage of its opponents, to whom he feels drawn without ever belonging. A great, emotionally complex portrait of time from an unusual perspective.

Text: Bernd Buder