Director: Rajko Grlic
Writer(s): Rajko Grlic, Ante Tomic
Cast: Toni Gojanovic, Sergej Trifunovic, Emir Hadzihafizbegovic
Awards: Winner of Multiple Festival Awards including Best Director
Language: Serbian, Croatian, Macedonian
The Office of Research and the Graduate College, in conjunction with the Athena Cinema, will be hosting a free screening of the film, Border Post by internationally renowned filmmaker and Eminent Scholar in film at Ohio University, Rajko Grlic as part of the International Educational Week. Professor Grlic will introduce his film prior to the screening. ONE NIGHT ONLY, November 14th at 7:30
BORDER POST
At a small border-post on the Yugoslav-Albanian border, yet another generation of soldiers suffering the usual amount of boredom awaits the end of their service, counting days to the moment when they should take their uniforms off for good. It is the spring of 1987 and the thought never even crosses their mind that they would, in fact, put them back on quite soon and go to war. These are the last days of the country called Yugoslavia. Yet no one knew at the time.
Daily routine of the army is disrupted by unusual circumstances. Frustrated and always drunk, lieutenant Safet Pasic feels a strange pain in his groins. He seeks help from the only doctor among the soldiers, Sinisa Sircevic, who finds out, very discretely, that it’s a sexually transmitted disease. Not wishing his wife to know about it and trying to find excuses not to go home, Pasic declares a state of emergency, claiming that the Albanian army is preparing an attack against Yugoslavia. A joke transforms into war hysteria: soldiers dig trenches, Pasic grows wilder as days go by, Sinisa embarks on a dangerous liaison, and his best friend Ljuba Paunovic makes an unconditional decision to leave the army. The situation slowly runs out of control…
Speaking about not so distant past with no nostalgia and no hatred, Border Post is a comedy about people on the verge of tragedy.
“Rajko Grlic’s film is a sometimes wistful, sometimes farcical comedy, in the honorable Eastern European tradition, set along the Yugoslav-Albanian border in the halcyon days of 1987.”-Andrew O’Hehir, Salon.com