Kako ubiv svetec (2004) User Reviews

Disturbing,harsh,crude

[ambitten · 7/10 · 28 September 2004]

This film demonstrate how harsh is the reality in the Balkans after the last war. More than unveiling the current state of the conflict it shows the enormous apathy and lack of perspectives that dominated the society, continuously involved in terrorism acts, extreme nationalism motivated by NATO forces presence and illegal activities. The story begins when a young girl returns to Macedonia after living for a couple of years in USA.Then she witness all the transformations that have been taking place in her homeland since she left. She notices that even a simple activity like driving a car with an official ID can be dangerous! Moreover, she realizes that her brother is strongly involved with all sort of illegal activities,ranging from smuggling to terrorism. This film is a crude alert to the terrible effects of the Balkans war and the challenges ahead for European unification.

bleak and confusing

[oksimoroni · 2/10 · 12 December 2004]

An interesting idea, but poor realisation. I have watched this movie on the festival of so-called "author-film", and it seemed to me that kinds of movies like this one are representing an excuse for lack of good story, lack of well-written script, and all that behind the wall of "author" or "European" way of film-making. You know, if you can offer a story about Balkan as a place of war-all-the-time, and if you add some bad melodrama to it, about broken homes and hearts, you can count on sentiment of the West public. But, when the public recognizes that the director is playing it low, aiming only on your emotions, without the artistic quality, the whole movie is falling apart. And, after some time, and numerous bad movies on that subject, there will be very hard to make that West-European or American public to watch movies about war in ex-Yugoslavia, even the good ones. It seems that director wanted realistic, natural acting, but the main actors are unconvincing, especially in sentimental scene, where the girl is telling to her brother about her daughter. It is not clear what exactly happened, and why the protagonist (he looks like Travis Bickle, that is the better part of his role) throw the bomb on icon ("killed the saint").

Apart from that, the movie becomes, on some parts, unwatchable boring. Too bad.