Ivica Pajer Movies
- 1978
Pavle Vujisic plays a man who fought against the fascists in Spain and went on to fight in the Resistance in Yugoslavia. In the postwar era, he is celebrated as a hero, and his house is famous as a memorial to his exploits. However, all around him high-rise apartments are being built in what was formerly a neighborhood of small houses. When he has a run-in with a famous soccer star, he decides to press charges against the athlete. In doing so, he begins to receive threats that his house will be the next one to be razed unless he drops the charges. Rather than compromise his principles in the face of what he feels to be inhuman corruption, he takes drastic measures. ~ Clarke Fountain, Rovi
- Starring:
- Predrag Manojlovic
- 1975
The son of Emperor Franz Josef of Austria, Crown Prince Rudolf, is believed to have shot his female lover and himself in a tragic suicide pact in 1882 in Mayerling. Due to Imperial cover-ups, the full story may never be known. This story has been filmed several times, in French in 1935 and in English in 1968. Hungarian director Miklos Jancso recreates those events for his own purposes, continuing his favored theme of the rejection of paternal authority. In the film, which has very little dialog, Rudolf is a good-natured pan-sexual golden boy, who cavorts on his rural estate with a host of beautiful, aristocratic lovers and friends of both sexes. He refuses to leave his country idyll even though he has been ordered to by the Emperor, his father. Despite the fact that for a large part of the film, attractive young people go about unclothed and engaging in erotic encounters, the mood is one of melancholy rather than prurience. The Prince is a political liberal who wishes to arrange things so that the Emperor will arrest him, creating a public scandal which will provide a rallying point for the opposition. Instead, when the expected troops come, Rudolf's sensuous friends loyally ward off the Imperial officers, humiliating them in the process. The result is that the guests, the Prince and a hermaphrodite friend are killed by newly arrived Imperial reinforcements, and the now-familiar official story of murder and suicide is concocted for public consumption. ~ Clarke Fountain, Rovi
- Starring:
- Lajos Balazsovits, Pamela Villoresi, (more)
- 1975
In the Middle Ages, the conditions endured by peasants and serfs were in some ways worse than those endured by slaves, and periodically there were peasant uprisings. Very few of these were even slightly successful. This Yugoslav film chronicles such an uprising in Croatia and Slovenia in 1573, under the leadership of Matija Gubec. ~ Clarke Fountain, Rovi
- Starring:
- Fabijan Sovagovic, Velimir "Bata" Zivojinovic, (more)
- 1959
Rooted in a farming culture and lifestyle, this routine drama by director Veljko Bulajic focuses on the interactions of a varied group of peasants as they are uprooted from their ancestral homes and packed off to new and better farming lands. Along the way, some travellers have time to enter into or continue a romantic liaison, while everyone responds in different ways to their forced migration. Vlak bez voznog reda was entered as a competing film in the 1959 Cannes Film Festival. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, Rovi
- Starring:
- Stole Arandjelovic, Olivera Markovic, (more)
