THE COMMUNIST PARADISE

The themes of the eponymous play by famous Serbian writer Aleksandar Popović provided the basis for Miloš Stojanović to direct the film Communist Paradise. Popović set the story during the period of World War II, but this is a story that’s about us today as much as it’s a story about us in the past. This is a story about people who live through the echoes of the world’s great upheavals. From the peripheries of civilisation, they toil and struggle to stay in step with the dramatic world changes that wash over them. They meander between the ideas that are imposed by each wave. Forwards or backwards, left or right, East or West? Or anything that makes it possible not only to survive, but to make a living. Popović’s characters are a bygone version of “political defectors”, people without ideas of their own or any sense of shame. The film follows these gluttonous converters, elated prophets and precursors of revolution, who are always prepared to quarrel over ideas that they don’t have, eager to humiliate others and ready to endure their own humiliation. The actors tasked with portraying our characters paint us as a group portrait in which everyone emits their own shriek, representing a personal scream of helplessness. They show our sharpened, extreme emotions and reactions. Their shriek shows the depths of despair among little people who are constricted between greats.