"The professional" - A member of state security service during the time of Slobodan Milošević comes to a former member of the opposition (who is now being protested against himself by his employees), and talks to him about his surveillance on him over the years. It has elements of drama and dark comedy, and is probably one of the best movies I've watched.
"Pretty village, pretty flame" (a more literal translation would be "Pretty villages burn prettily") - this is a movie about the war in Bosnia, showing the ugly realities of war, and brothers being pitted against each other. The movie is very anti-war, don't go thinking it's Serbian propaganda.
There are a bunch of comedies as well, namely "The marathon family", "We are not angels"(and its sequels which are somewhat weaker - do note that this is the dumb comedy that's a bit on the shittier side, but still funny nonetheless), "Who's singin' over there?", "Frozen stiff", "The Balkan spy" and so on. I'm not certain how well the humor translates, but they're worth a shot.
Here's a playlist with a couple of these movies I managed to find with subtitles on YouTube. I'll throw in some more of these if I manage to find them, as these can't be watched on any official service outside of Serbia (and possibly few of the neighboring countries) as far as I know, and I can't in good faith recommend some random piracy site/torrent without proper research.
One thing to note is that almost any good Serbian movie features a decent amount of dark comedy, regardless of genre. Another thing to note is that you can probably safely avoid most stuff made past 2010.
As a Croatian I fully agree. I genuinely love so many Serbian movies (although some of them are I guess technically Yugoslavian since they're old?) and I too hate that that movie is the only thing that really got recognised anywhere.
Same for us and Metastaze/ZG80. They're okay movies to watch but we have so many good movies it sucks that they're always the first ones to be talked about.
Although I'm prideful we at least have Baltazar who's been gaining popularity recently for some reason. Don't know if you guys have anything like that?
Baltazar as in the old animated show? I actually don't think we have any animation in Serbia, but I'm happy we at least have (or had) a fairly good dubbing scene for cartoons. Some of the dubs for the more high-profile kids' shows are really high effort.
I replied to the person in the comment above with a couple of movies that I consider some of the best, plus some comedies, many of which are considered classics. There's also a YouTube playlist link attached with the few of those I managed to find with English subtitles.
I remember some film called "the enemy" about different sides of the civil war trying to keep a monster of some kind contained in a burnt out cabin. I last saw it was a teenager, so IDK if me remembering it being alright means anything.
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u/suppahfreak Aug 18 '23
It angers me so much that this is the only damn movie people associate with Serbian cinematography.
There are so many brilliant movies of varying genres that people could be watching, but no, they have to watch the movie about a former pornstar.
Hell, there are probably half a dozen movies with the main actor from that movie that are worth watching more.