Summary
A Balkan village, baked by summer and pickled in plum brandy, watches its children stumble through a haze of sour breath and broken promises. A mother’s lullaby turns into a funeral hymn as her teenage son, once the fastest swimmer in the river, now shakes like a cracked bell; his father, a village bard, trades songs for shots until the fiddle rots. Around them, girls who should be weaving garlands for May Day stitch shrouds instead, while the schoolmaster—half Socrates, half scarecrow—pleads with hollow-eyed parents who swear the devil lives in the bottle, not the man. Markovic’s script lets time puddle like spilt rakija: we jump from harvest dance, where boots kick up copper dust, to winter’s first frost, when the same square hosts a pine coffin too small for its occupant. The camera lingers on calloused palms, on a grandmother counting rosary beads with the same fingers that once capped stills, on a little sister hiding behind flour sacks as her brother begs for change to feed the beast. Alcohol here is no seductive muse; it is a slow landslide, eroding kinship, language, even the memory of morning light. By the final reel the village is an echo—roofs caved in, icons sold, only the river retaining its mirror, reflecting absence where faces used to be. Yet the film refuses miserability: a last close-up of dew on nettles suggests that somewhere a seed may still split open, indifferent to human ruin.
Synopsis
An educational movie about deleterious effects of alcoholism.
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