Filme

Synopsis

Thirty-something Anica (Anica Dobra) feels restless in her dead-end life with an older man and small-time mobster in Belgrade. Milutin's (Fedja Stovanovic) caring affection for her isn't enough; Anica longs for true love. She has secretly decided to finally leave the country for good and start anew. Tonight she'll empty Milutin's safe of protection money and leave everything and everyone behind. So today is a very big day for Anica. She has a lot to do as she anticipates the moment when she'll part with her imperfect life - telling her grandmother goodbye, giving overdue beauty tips to a girlfriend.
What Anica doesn't know is that today is also an important day for those around her. A day for numerous confessions, confrontations and revelations. Milutin must ponder his own feelings as a single parent of a mute teenage daughter (Hanna Schwamborn). Milutin's young right hand man Stanislav (Vuk Kostic) is having a busy day himself handling skirmishes with competitors and dealing with his emotionally fragile singer mother (Milena Dravic).
But it's sensitive young thug Stanislav's confession of love to Anica which could change everything on this very day...

Statement Regisseur

LEAVING SERBIA
LOVE AND OTHER CRIMES is about a woman, Anica, who is not satisfied with her life in contemporary Serbia. Leaving the country has been a very big issue in Serbia for the last 15 years. Over 300,000 young people have left the country. Everybody has a friend living somewhere eise and you keep asking yourself every day whether you should leave or go. I had an urge to deal with this issue and show how hard it is to make this decision. I had heard about this true story of a woman who stole money and left. I wondered how come that story I heard kept coming back to me, and I wondered how it would feel to give up everything that was part of your life. For someone like Anica in LOVE AND OTHER CRIMES, there is no coming back. These issues ended up in the screenplay, as well as the question: What happens when you fall in love on the day that you're supposed to leave?

A SINGLE DAY
The film follows Anica over the course of her last day from morning to evening. In the evening, she is supposed to steal the money and leave, so during the day we see her meeting people who were part of her life. I always found time pressure to be an interesting dramaturgical element that pushes the story forward. The audience knows that Anica plans to leave at the end of the day, so everything that happens to her on that very day has much more intensity and meaning. There's also the lingering possibility that she could change her mind. At the same time, I thought that it would be exciting to try to portray somebody's life only through one day.

WARMTH AMIDST COLD SURROUNDINGS
The story explores a very closed society, this microcosmos in this neighborhood. The film is really about people, about relationships, about faces. I think that these faces are the warmest images in the film. It was important to me that the faces light up the images. The faces would be the warmth amidst these cold surroundings. I came to this conclusion after asking myself: If I would leave the country, what would I miss? It would be the people. That's also what makes leaving hard for the main character.

SMALL-TIME CRIMINALS
I grew up in a district of New Belgrade where people only had two choices: become a criminal or become an artist. I wanted LOVE AND OTHER CRIMES to reflect my personal view of Serbian society. During Milosevic's regime, Serbia was a society overrun with crime. Big criminal bosses were treated like celebrities - they were on the front pages, giving interviews about their personal lives, attending social events. The value system was turned upside down. I'm not really interested in mobsters. In LOVE AND OTHER CRIMES, some of the characters are people on the bottom of the hierarchy, people who turned criminal because of the times. People who turned to crime even though they didn't have a talent for it, but in order to survive. Things changed after Milosevic's fall in 2000. I wanted to portray this change, the transition that we are still going through in Serbia - from a crime-filled society to a hypermarket consumer society. The destiny of these small-time criminals was perfect to show this social and political transition on the level of small personal stories.

LOVE IS A CRIME
I noticed that whenever somebody hears the title of the film, a little smile usually appears on their face. So there must be some truth to love being a crime. If anything, love can make you commit crimes. Sometimes towards others, sometimes towards yourself. That's what my characters do. The title also corresponds to the film in a way that it puts together two extremes. It's about life's complexities. Nobody in the film is good or bad - they are both good and bad. They are humans, struggling to do the best they can with the lives they lead. That's my approach to this film. I don't give answers. I pose questions. And leave myself, the characters, and hopefully the audience, to the emotions.

FROM SHORT TO FEATURE
Making the transition from shorts to a feature-length shoot was very different for me. I had shot many shorts. But the shoot for the feature was as many days I had used for all of my shorts. It felt very strange, like I was running a marathon!

Film Info

Love And Other Crimes

Synopsis

Cast & Crew

Statement Regisseur

Cast & Crew

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Film Info

Love And Other Crimes

Synopsis

Cast & Crew

Statement Regisseur

Cast & Crew

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