Sarajevo Film Festival

Despite coming from the Balkans, I have hardly seen any movies from that region. Not even the famous Oscar-nominated Before The Rain from my home country. Fortunately, from 15 to 25 April Filmhuis Den Haag had a Best of... Sarajevo Film Festival. For 10 days it screened two or three feature films and a couple of shorts every day. All these movies came from countries from former Yugoslavia, Bulgaria and Romania. I saw two movies and and was in the audience for a panel discussion of producers and directors. What made this discussion clear is that it is not very surprising that I haven't seen many Balkan movies. They hardly get any distribution and financing them is very hard too. The movies are also hardly 80 minutes long and thus way shorter then the average movie. Despite this, the movies I saw were surprisingly good. I saw Cash and Marry and Slovenka. I'll only write about Slovenka here, but Cash & Marry is an absolutely hilarious semi-documentary about the quest of a Macedonian to find an Austrian wife so he can marry her to get all the necessary papers which will enable him to stay in Austria.

Slovenka is about a Slovenian female student, who works as a call-girl under the code-name of Slovenka(Slovenian Girl). When we meet her, business is going good for her. Since Slovenia is the president of the EU, many rich and lonely diplomats arrive there who are looking for some fun and distraction. She even manages to rent a nice apartment. But being a prostitute obviously doesn't offer much job security and her luck soon turns. One of her clients takes to much Viagra and dies. She runs away and now whole Slovenia, including her dad, wants to know who this mysterious Slovenka is.
Her dad is an old-fashioned Slovenian who loves his daughter, but just can't understand why someone would need two mobile phones. He used to play in a band and since his band mates are still his friends he wants to start playing again. After all if Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones still can play at old age, so can they.
In the meantime Slovenka is found by two pimps who want her to work for them or else they will tell the truth about her identity. One of the strengths of this movie is that this pimps are reasoning pretty logically. Slovenka, whose real name by the way is Aleksandra, is already a prostitute. Working for the pimps just means protection and probably more money, which she desperately needs, since she has a debt at the bank. But Aleksandra values her freedom more then this and runs away from the pimps. The rest of the movie simply consists of Aleksandra trying to get enough money to pay off her debt at the bank, so she can keep her apartment. Nothing really spectacular happens, but the movie's strength lies in its details and its often surprising black humor.
We are shown a Slovenia, which despite being in the EU, is still very poor outside of its capital city Ljubljana. Aleksandra's father complains that he can't even kill himself, because the funeral would cost Aleksandra to much money. And most ordinary Slovenians don't see much benefit from their country's presidency of the EU. Every day they here some annoying police sirens and the roads are very busy, it takes much longer to reach your destination And all these EU diplomats who shine on television and are driven around in expensive cars are in fact lonely, miserable people living in hotels around Europe with their only solace coming in the form of a local prostitute.
In the end it's worth mentioning that the actress playing Aleksandra gives a great performance and that the only bad part of the movie is it's incredibly excessive use of close-ups.