Radnicka klasa ide u pakao
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Working Class Goes to Hell is currently available for purchase or rental on video-on-demand.
DIRECTED BY: Mladen Djordjevic
FEATURING: Tamara Krcunovic, Leon Lucev, Szilvia Krizsán
PLOT: A group of former factory workers find solace in satanism.
COMMENTS: When a movie opens with murals of socialist era workers on the crumbling walls of an abandoned building, you understand pretty well what it will be about: a society in disarray looking back to an idolized past while trying to find hope in desperate times. And it is, as we follow a group of former factory workers trying to negotiate a better future for themselves and secure severance payment for an accident that happened years ago and took the lives of many of their loved ones.
Everything changes for the weirder when Mia, a man with some disturbing ideas of the apocalyptic kind, arrives in the group. At first, he persuades the group to conduct Satanic rituals to communicate with their dead loved ones. Then he offers more wish fulfillment. Will they find what they are looking for, and what will be the price?
Serbian director Djordjevic is known mostly for his shocking 2009 The Life and Death of a Porno Gang, a provocative piece of cinema that went largely unnoticed because of the release of an even more disturbing Serbian movie in the same year, the infamous A Serbian Film. But whatever comes from this director needs to be examined as potentially weird, especially when supernatural events are mentioned.
What we have here, though, is a contemporary moral parable with hints of the supernatural and the apocalyptic. More grounded than a typical horror—only some bad omens like birds falling dead hint at the supernatural—this tale portrays moral decay and the worship of false idols in an ambiguous, non-didactic way. While the idols prove to be hollow in the end, a new unity emerges from the experience of common rituals, reigniting the passion of our characters to continue fighting for their rights. It is almost wholesome.
Balkan cinema is known for eccentric magical realist works, like the filmography of Emir Kusturica. Here the tone is less lighthearted, but a similar exaggeration of reality in a portrait of societal upheaval takes shape, climaxing with an urgent act of vigilantism. There are many nods to the history of the country too, from the Ottoman Empire to its recent socialist past, giving context and enriching the narrative.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
An ornately told tale from Iran about an enthusiastic child who ends up trading his ability to sing and shout for a spinning top. The animation is distinctly non-Western, and beautiful. The little boy in question travels within an ever-shifting frame of stylized flowers as he encounters the quilt man, pool man, and the salt man. The up tempo feel is brought down to earth when the salt man takes away the boy’s youthful vigor, leaving only the memories within the top.
This is the only foam-imation I’ve ever seen, and accompanying the weird look achieved by animating its weird narrative about a young man who is protected by his mother’s dreams with polystyrene. Four dreams in particular–“Fire,” “Insect,” “Pumpkin,” and “Corpse”–are highlighted, each heavily symbolic and lovingly rendered in Styrofoam. The short ends with the mother advising her son (grown, with wife and child) not to go out that day; the grateful lad thanks the heavens for the meticulous fence his mother has constructed around him.
By a whisker, this was the strangest short of the crop—both to listen to, and to look at. The sound is purposely muted, as if one is listening to the dialogue (actually, mostly monologues) through a telephone propped against an old tape recorder. The visual element, however, practically shouts from the screen. What is going on here? There are too many clues, too many things going on, to be certain; the final shot suggests a hospital. And the garbled vocal exposition suggests a mental one, at 
