We have all watched the wars and horrors going on in the Balkans during the past decade on the evening news, the people and events all seemed like images in a far away world, which makes them seem remote and almost unreal. Their lack of substantiality causes them to be forgotten as soon as they are off the screen. We throw around terms like "ethnic cleansing" and "war crimes" with little thought for the harsh realities that underlie the words. It takes a movie like Goran Paskaljevic's Cabaret Balkan to bring home the truth of what is transpiring in the part of the world formerly known as Yugloslavia.

With titles such as Vukovar, Pretty Village Pretty Flame, The Wounds and Welcome To Sarajevo, Cabaret Balkan shares the same traits which can at times be difficult to watch. These few titles however would be familiar to only the most devout movie goers. People go to the cinema to escape reality, but movies such as Cabaret Balkan bring us face to face with the deepest and darkest cruelties of modern civilization.

Set in the mid 90's, the movie deals with 20 people whose lives criss cross in one night in Belgrade. Law and order have broken down, the city is run by police who do not serve the law and are as much part of the problem as anyone else. Characters are introduced in a fashion that would seem almost random, but quickly their little thread in the whole tapistry becomes very obvious. We drift in and out of their lives, and they do not appear on screen for more than ten minutes each. But during those ten minutes the viewer becomes so entwined in the character's life that the images conjured up become so horrific and real that it is sometimes hard to swallow.

Two best friends reveal lifelong betrayals in a boxing ring. A cabby buys drinks for a cop he crippled in revenge. A man returns after a long time to reclaim his lost love. A young man holds up a bus with nothing but a little knife and a stream of profane words...the movie definitely drives the point home almost ruthlesly. The director Goran Paskaljevic uses many close up shots to portray this stark reality, with no actors covered in make up by teams of artists, just real people in an unreal world.

The score of Cabaret Balkan is in no way inferior to the cinematography. It is one of the most moving pieces of music, that, when combined with the graphical images of the film, leaves the viewer dazed and disoriented. It schocks the viewers into considering something they wouldn't have dreamt even in their nightmares - the harshness of reality. I have never heard such a powerful combination in a movie in a long time, quite possibly ever.

Which brings us to the moral of the movie. Are the Balkans indeed so far away, or can something like that happen to any modern nation? Thirty years ago the late Stanley Kubrick shocked the world with his portrayal of human society gone wrong in A Clockwork Orange. However, the crucial difference is that Cabaret Balkan is not a fantasy; it is a very real reality.

The culminative effect is that Cabaret Balkan is a great movie. It's dark images almost certainly deserve the MPAA rating of R18. The movie was originally released in 1998, but because of the crisis at the time, the release was postponed in the States until after the dust settled. It has since won the Best Picture award in many European Film festivals, and was nominated for an Oscar for Best Foreign Film in 1998, and has been welcomed by critics and movie goers all around the world.

For me, it was one of the best, most vivid and most moving film experiences ever. I have nothing but the highest accolades for it. A standing ovation. Nothing but superlatives in describing it. Truly marvelous. My rating almost certainly 11 out of 10.
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