The best Zoran Cvijanović’s drama movies

A story that stretches across war, blossoming love, and living as a recluse.

In the opening stages of the Bosnian War, a small group of Serbian soldiers are trapped in a tunnel by a Muslim force.

A sergeant officer lives a life of a loner, reads literary classics and dreams about acting. On his journey by train, he madly falls in love with a prostitute, but her pimp - another passenger on a train - is not willing to let her go, which makes their destiny tragic.

This film follows two Belgrade youths on their rise to gangster legends in a decaying society.

During the Battle of Sutjeska, partisan troops must endure 24 hours of big and heavy attacks on German units Ljubino grave, to the main Partisan units, with the wounded and the Supreme Headquarters, pulled out the ring that is tightened around them.

In Autumn of 1941, the German army, determined to put down a Communist-led uprising in Serbia, is conducting a policy of killing 100 hostages for any German soldier killed. The city of Kraljevo is the site of one of those massacres, portrayed in this movie.

Anica lives in New Belgrade, a miserable district of tower blocks and concrete. She is mistress to Milutin, a wealthly local criminal who owns a solarium and runs a protection racket. Anica is determined not to grow old in this dump where neither love nor life seems to offer her a decent future. One grey winter’s day Anica has an idea to steal money from Milutin’s safe, get on a plane and leave the country forever.

Zulawski tackles Modest Mussorgsky’s famous opera about the bloody battle for ascendancy to the throne of Russia in the 17th-century! With a score conducted by Mstislav Rostropovich, Zulawski adds extra layers of devilish meta-textual embellishment by composing the film’s imagery as though we are watching a theater piece of a film crew making a movie about the opera of “Boris Godounov”! As well, the picture is full of delightful anachronisms that mock the then-contemporary Russian government, alongside jabs at other 20th-century dictatorships. So incensed was Rostropovich by Zulawski’s juiced final product — one that took liberties with the narrative’s sexual thrust, amongst other things — that he (unsucessfully) took Zulawski to court for “the violation of the Russian soul”! “Impressive in its use of whirling camera movements as well as mega close-ups of the contracted faces of its singers, ‘Boris Godounov’ is one of the most original opera movies ever made”

Luka Banjanin is an unemployed young man living with his parents in Belgrade. He hangs out with few devoted friends who, like him, are yet to find place in a society that discarded young intellectuals. He plays saxophone and dreams about going to Oktoberfest, the annual beer festival in Munich, but he's being unable to get passport because of a smaller drug incident he had in the past. Totally careless about his long-term girlfriend, he suddenly falls for a mysterious woman who seems to appear in the same places as him, and then vanishes as quickly as possible. Believing that he's at the wrong place at the wrong time, Luka wanders from one misadventure to another, gradually losing the contact with reality and living out his own Oktoberfest in his mind.

Bane and Vesna are young and happy couple. Vesna gets pregnant, but soon she was told that Bane was not faithful to her, which was a lie made by their female acquintance. Vesna's parents decide to sell their little son to a German couple. After finding out what has happened, Bane kidnaps the baby and runs away with it on his motorcycle. With the help of his loyal friends, he seeks hideout from the police.

Seventeen year old Natasha, a daughter of a murdered police inspector, tries to discover her father's killers.

The exploits of a depressed architect in Belgrade as he wanders about searching for the future in a land where the future no longer exists. Handsome Nikola is in his mid-thirties. He earned the nickname Champ because he used to race speedboats. He makes a decent living as a free-lance architect and his apartment is spacious and comfortable. Ana is attracted by the Champ's good looks and apparent prosperity. He is always pensive though; even when he is out drinking at the local clubs with his companions he cannot help but brood about the state of Belgrade. Though the city appears fairly normal on the outside, the presence of the war is signalled when a reluctant conscript in the army is dragged away.

Love triangle story between the village gendarme Đorđe, his wife Katarina and the young disabled war veteran Gavrilo during the time between First Balkan War and World War I.

End of childhood, first love and misunderstandings that seem unsolvable. Comic story of sixteen years old boy who seems to be all against his dreams - and the families and friends, and the world from the supermarket where he works.

After a quarrel with his wife, a man leaves their apartment with one suitcase only. Having slept in a train station, the police legitimates him and found him suspicious. Soon he'll find himself locked in a prison with several other, mostly innocent people. The true horror begins only then.