Stefan Arsenijevic’s “Love and Other Crimes” on Zagreb Film Festival 2008

www.zagrebfilmfestival.com represented Serbian film. On one way, generally speaking, it’s a typical Serbian film, showing general depressive atmosphere in Serbia nowadays, with alienated people, spared from direct impact of a civil war but self-destructive on the other way.  As it is a Serbian/German/Austrian/Slovenian co-production film still represents Serbia.

 It is happening in Belgrade’s so called ghetto-New Belgrade, where people often do feel trapped as rats.

Director Stefan Arsenijevic started out his career with making a number of short films which worked well at festivals. In 2003 he received a Golden Bear for the Oscar-nominated short (A) Torsion. It is obvious that this movie meant to be very complex, but slightly different film because it is made with bit of the humor and atmosphere. It is also kind of depressively poetic. Luckily film have a fantastic crew to cover up the moods. And what director did best here is a fantastic casting (Milena Dravic, Vuk Kostic, Anica Dobra). 

“Love and Other Crimes”  follows the life of one woman from dawn till dusk. She here is saying goodbye to her past life. At the end she steals money and leaves the country. Through the story and the people she meets we see what her life really looks like.  

Stefan Arsenijevic:“It is a mosaic of small stories and I was improving the construction of the dramaturgy all the time. After this long process, it took me only a few days to write the final script. This was my first time working on a script for a feature-length film, and I found it very complex.”