Played out against the background of the sombre and corrupt Balkans is this story about two fathers. One is looking for the corpse of his son, killed in an accident; the other is looking for his daughter who has ended up in prostitution. The dramatic situations are laced with black humour by Dragin (Tiger Award winner 2002).
Romania about 200 years ago. Peasants drag a wooden church across a frozen lake to their village. They’re not allowed to build one, because they are Orthodox Christians. The Balkan region in the post-communist era. A Serbian man is looking for the body of his son, who died in a car crash in Romania. A Romanian man wants to find his daughter, who was forced to work in a brothel in Kosovo. They meet by the illegal border crossing on the River Danube.
What follows is a depressing, black tragicomedy in which there is plenty of drinking and prostitution, corpses are sold for a thousand euros and corruption flourishes. All against the background of the turbulent political history of the Balkans with continually fragmented nation-states and a Babylonian mix of languages.
That the region has always been the site of fierce and often bloody conflicts is made clear by Sinisa Dragin (Tiger Award winner in 2002 with Every Day God Kisses Us on the Mouth) in this incomparable succession of absurd dramatic situations.
Short Profile of Sinisa Dragin by Ioanna Salagean, student MA Film Curating at the London Consortium:
Sinisa Dragin's multi-award-winning film Every Day God Kisses Us on the Mouth (2002) caught everyone by surprise - and rightly so. There are few other titles anywhere near as titillating and thought-provoking in the recent history of Romanian or Serbian production. The IFFR gave it an award at a time of furious transformation: the regional cinemas of Eastern Europe and the Balkans were slowly opening up. All the seeds where already there, presumably.
Dragin has never been much interested in the recent minimalist discourses of Romanian cinema. By employing a distinct narrative and a particular visual strategy, he has never positioned himself as part of a ‘wave’. Rather, his cinematic approach has become more and more evident over the years via subtle forms of filmic and narrative experimentation. This is evident in If the Seed Doesn’t Die (2010).
In fact, it is not surprising, given that Dragin has a background in non-fiction footage. Working as a cameraman for Reuters TV International News Agency, he had all the opportunities in the world to detect Where Europe Ends (also the title of a documentary he has been involved with directing) and decided that Europe ends here, metaphorically and otherwise. His position within the geographical and socio-political innuendos of the Iron Curtain has been somewhere in-between. His films retain a slightly dissident feeling of exile, internal or otherwise.
Certainly, winning the main prize at the Oberhausen Film Festival in 1994 with The Sorrow of Black Gold was not detrimental to his career as a filmmaker. A plethora of respected, though unflashy awards followed - a sign that things were about to turn his way. It is hard to envisage what his future prospects would have looked like without the attention and support of the IFFR, among others. This type of cinema, working against the trend, as it were, needs all sorts of encouragement and appreciation. This particular seed calls for protection and nourishment. After all, the greatest call of a filmmaker is his/her ability to speak with a genuinely outspoken voice about the past, mythology, traditions and everything standing in between.