Every movie I’ve clicked on has been about people suffering as art.Ī Serbian Film is about a married aging porn star, Milos, with a huge “talent.” Milos, strapped for cash, gets one last well-paying gig from a rich filmmaker, Vukmir, with Western interests, though Milos never hears what the film will entail. Life is a Miracle is about an engineer with a mentally unstable wife and a son who wants to play football, but is recruited for the Balkan wars…then the engineer falls in love with a Muslim hostage. Oh, and his uncle is diagnosed with diabetes. The first link I selected from Wikipedia’s Cinema of Serbia page under “Famous movies from Serbia”, was When Father Was Away on Business, a story about a young boy who struggles to survive while his dad is sent to a labor camp, falls in love with a girl who is taken away by ambulance, and witnesses his father’s mistress attempt suicide. The first time I noticed this was the American movie, Not Without My Daughter, which depicted the horrors of the Islamic culture against women, but was primarily about some woman who was suffering indignities in order to rescue her daughter. It’s all about emotional suffering under the guise that it teaches you something about the culture it is depicting. Suffer porn is the genre of small foreign films which are all completely about somebody suffering at the hands of an evil culture or government, and either overcoming the atrocities or dying in the final frames. A Serbian Film is a torture porn film exaggerating what I call suffer porn. It is a film that is decrying the diminishing of Serbian cultures in order to fund and churn out art that is aimed directly at Western – read: American – audiences. Instead, A Serbian Film is a film directly commenting on the state of Serbian sociological culture in general, and film and arts culture in particular. If it is about the Balkan Wars, and the atrocities committed during the course of it, it is only in the most tangential of ways, in that they gave first-hand knowledge of the kind of horrors one human can commit against another. This isn’t about the Balkan Wars, as some have posited, except to Western eyes trying to seek out some deeper meaning in a post-modern contextual manner. This is not that film.Ī Serbian Film is a film created by a rich Serbian as a damning critique of the state of Serbian culture. When an artist throws a temper tantrum, sometimes the results can be amazing.

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