Scenes of Serbia

With the premier of The Cordon at the Montreal World Film Festival in August, Serbian director Goran Markovic completed his trilogy on the fall of Slobodan Milosevic. Earlier films in the trilogy are Burlesque Tragedy, which won an award at the 1995 Montreal festival, and Serbia, Year Zero (2001). The Cordon, named best film of the festival by an international jury, tells a story of the impact of Milosevic's years in power.

I asked Markovic about how he merges television news coverage of the 1996-97 Belgrade street protests with the tightly focused story of an exhausted police unit that randomly beats protesters. "Those street scenes were not from television footage," he told me. "We re-created all of those street scenes, based on what we knew had happened."

The film opens with images that have been shot by a young television cameraman who is running from police. With him is the daughter of the captain of the police unit. The cameraman and the girl are lovers, and they celebrate an escape from the police with a brief interlude of lovemaking under a stairwell.