If you’ve heard of A Serbian Film, you’ll be aware of its reputation as one of the most controversial movies ever made. Its notoriety is now being dissected in A Serbian Documentary, exploring what it was like to be involved in such boundary-pushing filmmaking, and for which a trailer has been released.
The story sees Miloš, a semi-retired porn star with a wife and young son, lured back into the business with the promise of making big budget arthouse pornography with a visionary director. His precarious financial situation forces him to agree without knowing anything about what will be expected of him, and he too late realizes that he’s been pulled into a dark and dangerous world intermingling sex and violence from which he cannot escape.
People’s attitudes towards A Serbian Film often depend on whether or not they’ve actually seen it rather than just heard about its content. While it features intentionally depraved content such as incest, necrophilia, pedophilia and snuff, at its core it’s a satirical piece intended as a radical reaction to how director and co-writer Srđan Spasojević perceives his country’s movie industry, that of largely toothless state-sanctioned productions made with foreign investment that have little connection to the nation or its people, as well as being symbolic of how Serbia’s government treats its citizens.
This new documentary is made by Stephen Biro, the founder of exploitation flick distributor Unearthed Films and creator of the American Guinea Pig series of extreme horrors, and features interviews with the cast and crew of A Serbian Film as well as behind the scenes footage shot during the movie’s production showing the work that went into its multiple moments of gory horror.
A Serbian Documentary will provide a retrospective of the impact made by its subject, putting its brutality in an analytical light and revealing how its reputation affected all those involved.
