For those of you unfamiliar with Serbian cinema, two defining elements weave through most films: ironic gallows humour, and a tendency to mirror the era in which they were made. The post-second world war period was littered with jingoistic tributes to Tito’s partisans, while the 90s gazed into the abyss of the Yugoslav wars. Now, if Ivan Ikić’s Varvari (aka Barbarians) – nominated for best debut feature at Raindance – is anything to go by, the nation’s filmmakers have begun a nihilistic descent into the rubble of daily life.
Set in Ikić’s hometown, a crumbling, industrial backwater on the edge of Belgrade, Varvari is both a coming-of-age teen drama and an autopsy of Serbia’s decline. It follows Luka and Flash, a pair of adolescent football hooligans as they traipse through a dead-end purgatory of boozing, fucking and fighting. Despite being a bit Kidulthood on the surface, it’s tinged with a tragic sentimentality that positions it closer to Shane Meadows’ This Is England. Google will find you detailed plot synopses, but in Ikićs’s words, “it’s a film about identity and what defines it. About how we develop as human beings and how the elements of your environment change you, eventually transforming you into the person you definitely didn’t want to be.”
Varvari has a personal resonance for me, as it’s a snapshot of an alternate reality that could have been my life. I was born in 1989 as Yugoslavia’s unravelling edged towards critical mass; Slobodan Milošević had just ascended to power, prompting my parents to start packing their bags. Our proverbial lottery ticket arrived in May 1993, but we still visited regularly. My childhood summers were spent with my cousin and his friends, festering aimlessly in the shadow of brutalist soviet-era tower blocks.
In truth, the film’s characters, locations, and subplots are mere nuances – Varvari could have been set anywhere in Serbia, my friends could have been extras. Serbia is ranked third in the International Business Time’s “Top 10 most miserable countries in the world”, with youth unemployment sitting around 50%; emigration is the only realistic path to success. Even local footballing giants Red Star, European Cup winners in 1991, recently had their electricity cut off because of unpaid bills. It’s a fitting analogy for the state of the nation.
Year after year I’d return to find my mates exactly where I left them. Questions of “what’s new?” were met with dumbfounded stutters. I’d watch them mentally sift through the months trying to find a worthy talking point, but when this week is indistinguishable from the last and the one yet to come, life blurs into a homogenous mass. As their window to the world, they’d quiz me with questions like “how wide is the Thames compared to the Sava?” and send me to photograph Premier League grounds they’d never get to visit.
Locally, the film has polarised opinion. Those I’ve spoken to say it’s a tired story that they’re sick of hearing; one even dismissed it as poverty porn pandering to a foreign film festival audience. Others object to its “excessively negative” portrayal of Serbia. Few, however, have actually seen it; “This is Hollywood compared to our reality,” Ikić says. “The majority of criticism comes from people who haven’t watched it and don’t want to because this is their reality that they refuse to face up to. They see it every day, but they don’t process it.”
Varvari is also oddly relevant to British audiences. In it we see a generation who have had their prospects gambled away by the transgressions of their elders, something that probably resonates with hundreds of thousands jobless graduates in Britain, whereas Luka and Flash lead almost identical lives to kids I know on Southwark council estates. I, paradoxically, left opportunity-choked London this year for Belgrade because my western education and qualifications take me further here. The parallels between Serbia’s present and Britain’s trajectory of austerity might make for uncomfortable viewing.
• Varvari premieres at Raindance film festival in London on 2 October
