Normal People

The year is 2000, the last months of the Milošević regime, in a Belgrade suburb. A group of friends meets every evening at the local café. They dream of leading normal lives.

Steva the bartender is in love with an actress. Duja is in love with his motorbike. Bane, the café owner, is planning to steal it from him. Nikola, back from the war, is looking for a job.

Toma, an ambulance driver, is in love with Mira. Mira is in a relationship with a criminal. He abuses her. Sometimes she thinks she is in love with Toma…

* The project was produced in co-production with the joint ORB and ZDF program “OSTWIND”

COOKY ZIECHE is the editor-in-chief of ORB’s film department.

TORSTEN KLEIN is the head of production of ORB’s film department.

A suburb of Belgrade - a ghetto within a ghetto. The hopelessness, claustrophobia and loneliness of my generation in the last months of the Milošević regime. It seems as if it will never end.

A postwar atmosphere and depression. The lives of my friends, all their needs, ambitions, dreams and expectations are worthless. All moral and social values have been destroyed; the country we were born and raised in has been destroyed. We have grown used to war, death and fear. For ten years we have watched death and destruction. There is no work, no money. Life is a struggle for survival. We live in uncertainty. And violence. Anything can happen, at any moment. We are hostages, trapped in the time and place we find ourselves in, locked in a claustrophobic system. And the future looks like a life of misery and poverty.

The ghetto, the impossibility of choice, only highlights the problem. The characters try to fight for their place in the sun and to find some meaning and balance in their threatened lives. This story could happen anywhere: in Berlin, Paris, New York, Oslo… but in Belgrade it is special.

This film does not set out to offer any kind of explanation, but to deal with the fate of individuals who dream of becoming “normal people” leading “normal lives”. But they are far from normal.

They have nowhere to go, and staying is unbearable. Their expectations are modest and simple. But solutions are nowhere in sight. It is a life that is the same every day. Lost in unfulfilled daydreams.

All my characters are young people. They know each other well and meet every evening at the same place, a café… They are already disillusioned, and each new day is just more proof that nothing will get better and that there is no way out. Each of them wants to escape, to survive. They rarely listen to one another when they talk. There is a lot of lying. Their positions are always opposed, even when they argue about nonsense. What matters is never said.

The visual key is simplicity. Empty spaces. The colors are muted, the impression achromatic. The aim is to create the impression of a black-and-white film shot in color. The style of the film, for me, is poetic neorealism.