A SERBIAN FILM aims to show the concentrated Serbian experience: the distilled feelings of a people who have suffered horrifying violations by those charged with protecting them. In the decades following the Yugoslav war, the Serbian people experienced overwhelming rates of unemployment and a stark rise in serious crime. A culture that blames victims instead of perpetrators. It can also be seen as a metaphor for the female experience, walking through a world that is not built for them, but built for their objectification and castigation for merely existing. It is exploitative because the people of Serbia are exploited. The filmmakers behind A SERBIAN FILM have repeatedly stated that the film is an allegory of the atrocities Serbia has endured.
A SERBIAN FILM UNCUT WATCH FULL
Many women who have suffered an assault do not want to see an award-winning actress with a full face of makeup getting raped with an award-winning cinematographer framing her beautiful, tear-soaked face.
The scenes in these films take a Hollywood soft lens look at what abuse or assault does to a woman while rarely taking into consideration that the woman is, in fact, not defined by that abuse. And mainstream films continue to use the abuse of women as a tool for a man’s vengeance. The truth is, many women walk through society, through all societies, with the abject knowledge that they are one dark alley away from a vicious attack, that they could trust a man implicitly only to have him turn on them in a moment and hurt them, possibly kill them. Women are perceived as objects still, always, despite the ever-expanding campaigns, hashtags, and protests. The question often asked is, “What the fuck is wrong with you?!” The idea seems to be that in order for a woman to enjoy watching subversive and controversial films there must be something broken inside of her. There is a similar stigma placed on women who watch and enjoy the genre. Gavrilović talks about feeling the need to justify her involvement in a film that most people find too vile to view (as well as the strange juxtaposition of later voicing Elsa in the Serbian version of Frozen.) There is a stigma placed on women involved in the making of Extreme Horror films, like A SERBIAN FILM, due to the amount of violence and sexual violence portrayed on screen toward women. It’s interesting to listen to Gavrilović speak about her experience playing Marija, the doomed mother and wife to Miloś (Srdjan Todorovic), a semi-retired porn star who opts to sign a contract to star in one last ill-fated film, of which garish filmmaker Vukmir (Sergej Trifunovic) is the only one to privy to the script. It signified that viewers were not so offended as to miss the cultural and social relevance in the physical violence and sexual violence. The combination of excessive sex and violence, however, tends to push a film into the “Extreme Cinema” category, a genre that is often looked down on as trashy and lacking in substance. The gang-rape of a woman in The Accused (1988) and the pervasive violence in The Hateful Eight (2015) were seen as controversial, but the unintimidating kind of controversial that manages to garner awards.
It reads like a bit of poetry, and, if the viewer can manage to look beyond their own righteous indignation, the film itself plays out like the kind of tragedy one might see if Grand Guignol theater copulated with Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus. In film criticism, it often seems that sex and violence – if separate – are fine and lauded themes. They fuck you when you die in our country,īecause you always owe something to somebody.” During a Q&A bonus feature on the new unrated, uncut, Blu-ray release of A SERBIAN FILM, actress Jelena Gavrilović recalls the very statement that director Srdjan Spasojevic said to her that convinced her she needed to do the film: