Practical Guide to Belgrade with Singing and Crying Director: Bojan Vuletić, Serbia

The story follows four couples, one at a time, each of them representing stages in romantic relationships: falling in love, the crisis, the adultery and the marriage. One of the two is always a foreigner that gets caught in the passion the Serbs exude in everything they do. Regardless of nationality, it is the women that drive men around, pulling the strings and dictating the direction they should go (one of the female characters is an actual dominatrix). Women drive man crazy, they get them drunk, they make them obey, they forgive them for cheating and only afterwards they confess their own missteps. They carry on as mothers and working-women with the same intensity as they are lovers, and men have no choice but to subdue to their domination.

The leaders and the followers both exaggerate in their feelings, as well as in their actions. They are prone to quickly changing states of heart and of mind, characterizing the Serbs as eager to prove themselves as Europeans to the bone, while at the same time holding on nostalgically to their music, their places, their traditions. They are geographically “east of the west”, but their ambition is to not just match, but surpass the westerners in being western.

The images capture almost postcard-like glimpses at the city as a background to couples kissing and impromptu choirs (flight attendants, police intervention troops, road workers, prisoners). As they are working to modernize the city and the society, the Serbs passion and way of life is still deeply rooted in the folk songs about love that these choirs sing. The openness of Belgrade, their progress in economy or infrastructure are proudly stated, and they have an “out with the old, in with the new” philosophy. But the way they fall in love and the way they conduct themselves in romantic relationships seems to follow an age-old code that applies equally to locals and foreigners; the more some things change, the more others stay the same.

By Mirona Nicola