Cinema
Balkan Spy
Балкански шпијун
Dušan Kovačević · 1984
Synopsis
Belgrade. Ilija Čvorović, a former partisan of Stalin who paid for his convictions with several years in the camp at Goli otok, is summoned by the police for a few routine questions about his subtenant, Petar Jakovljević, a tailor who has returned from Paris after twenty years to open a workshop. He is let go after a few minutes, but leaves convinced that the tenant is a spy. He begins to watch him and draws his wife, his daughter and his twin brother into the hunt.
Context
Kovačević wrote the play in 1982 and brought it to the screen two years later from his own screenplay, sharing the direction with Božidar Nikolić, the cinematographer who also signed the photography. Danilo Stojković, known as Bata, took on in the film the role of Ilija that he played on stage, and critics rank it among the greatest of his career. The text has not left the stage: the National Theatre in Belgrade remounted it in 2018, and the Croatian National Theatre in Rijeka has staged it in turn.
Who it is for
An hour and a half, in Serbian. It is better to know that after the break with Stalin in 1948, his Yugoslav supporters were sent to the camp of Goli otok, from which the main character emerges.
Prizes and reception
One of the hundred Serbian films declared cultural assets of great importance by the Yugoslav Film Archive in 2016.