Radmila Zivkovic Movies
- 1987
This is classified as a rollicking comedy in Yugoslavian territories, despite having a story dealing with a realistic and horrifying catalogue of woes. In the film, seven women friends have grown tired of working for a farmer who refuses to pay their wages. They steal one of his tractors to go into town. There, they employ a black-market labor operative to help them find work in Munich. He takes their money and passports to try and help them do just this but winds up arrested before he can do anything to help them. The women are then forced to go through a local health exam to be passed as eligible for work, and after that, they somehow pull through, despite a series of rapes, pregnancies, and beatings. When they finally do get a job together at a new factory, they discover that the factory has no access to raw materials and will shortly be shutting down. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Mirjana Karanovic, Radmila Zivkovic, (more)
- 1987
If this is, as it seems, a typical Yugoslavian comedy, the grim events taking place there in the 1990s seem more comprehensible. Grandpa Buda seems like he is one who can take everything in stride, just as it comes to him. When Marshall Tito dies, he invites the neighborhood gypsies into his back yard to listen to the television coverage of the events following that. Then he invites them inside. After a while, he invites them to live in the backyard permanently, which his family thinks is carrying goodwill a bit too far. He takes the accidental deafening of his grandson in stride, learning sign language to compensate for it. He even seems to take the theft (by a magpie) of his cherished gold retirement watch in stride, though he does spend much of his time searching the neighborhood for it. However, when he learns that his grown daughter's illness which he had been raising money for is a fake, he falls into a depression and kills himself. Apparently, this was one bearing-up too many. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Predrag Lakovic, Zvonko Lepetic, (more)
- 1984
In this amusing political satire, director Predrag Antonijevic parodies two hypocritical party chairmen in a small village, and by inference, the Yugoslavian political system on a broader scale. The first chairman of the people's council occupies his time rather dubiously -- by throwing grenades into a stream to kill off many fish at once (a well-known, illegal technique, usually done with dynamite). One day the chairman finds an unexploded bomb, and, in the process of trying to extract its gunpowder, he blows himself up and not the fish. Villagers ignore how he died, call him a hero, and name a school after him. The next party chairman is out for serious reform and begins a campaign to awaken the peasants to class consciousness -- and in turn, dies an ignominious death. Once more, the villagers laud their dearly departed chairman in terms that none could really believe, and life goes on as they wait for the next chairman to take up whatever erratic, illegal, or extreme behavior he prefers. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Zvonko Lepetic, Radmila Zivkovic, (more)
- 1981
As a background to this story, both Greek and Yugoslavian Macedonians fought in WW II against the Nazis, but after the war, Macedonians were divided between the communist Yugoslav sector, and the Greek sector that was primarily non-communist. That situation led to a 10-year civil war in Greek Macedonia between its politically divided factions, and when it was over in 1956, the communists on the Greek side of Macedonia were deported to the USSR. This story is about Boris (Bata Zivojinovic), one of the communist partisan fighters who is put on a freighter with many of his compatriots, unloaded on the eastern shore of the Black Sea and then sent by train to Tashkent. The scenes of killing before the partisans were put on the freighter, and a disturbing vision Boris experiences, do not bode well for the future. After he arrives, Boris gets into a relationship with a Russian woman who makes him happy for awhile, but not enough to overcome his homesickness, or the effect of the tragedies and loss of hope that permeate his exiled community. In the end, this is too much for him to bear, and he returns home to his mountain village in Macedonia. There he finds that the villagers -- including a grown daughter -- have unwillingly submitted to their new lives, made much worse by a gang of petty thugs who lord it over everyone, especially those who had fought on the losing side of the civil war. Boris has never lost sight of his own ideals and his backbone is a little straighter than those around him, so when the gang members continue to ridicule and goad him, a showdown seems inevitable. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Velimir "Bata" Zivojinovic
- 1980
Brushed with shadings of a larger social and political commentary, this occasionally hilarious and consistently funny comedy looks at a closet alcoholic, Dr. Ilich (Ljuba Tadic) who treats alcoholism in others with an iron hand and a zany therapeutical approach. Between the music of Wagner, a diet in which apples figure prominently, and exercises that look like Chicken Little in take-off mode, the doctor is convinced his patients will be cured. What really ails most of them is what caused their alcohol problem in the first place -- so when the eccentric doctor takes six of his patients to a nearby brewery to demonstrate the success of his treatment, chaos results. First the apples taken on the trip are spiked by one patient (two of them "clink" their apples in joy) and then the brewery management and its own alcohol-addicted crew add to the patients' antics. ~ Eleanor Mannikka, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Ljuba Tadic, Milena Dravic, (more)
