Goran Paskaljevic can only have been twenty four when he made this film and it shows astonishing talent. Set at some unspecified time in the past it shows the life of a Serbian family, ploughing with miniature oxen, grinding wheat with a hand-operated kern. The patriarch of the family is ill and can only clear away stones turned over by the plough. That night the family knows that he must die if the others will live to harvest. They report their decision to other families around- there is a long scene where the crippled herald walks to a tree and pounds a tree-trunk to draw the people to him. The old man is ceremonially washed, carried in a cart and laid down with a loaf of bread at his head. "It is not us but the bread that kills him." the people chant. He accepts it, almost as a relief. Finally the men go to the top of the cliffs and the last shot shows the rocks coming over to kill the old man. Like Marketa Lazarova the film adopts and adapts the psychology of a long-gone past as a basis for the way it shows things. Long, ritualistic shots show hard physical labour- a life for ever on the edge of hunger, a world where death is imminent- it isn't until well into the film that anyone speaks: breath is too precious for speech and in an isolated peasant society there is nothing to say. Filmed in long, ritualistic takes, even the camera adjusts to the way of life it depicts. A wonderful little film without a wasted moment/
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