Nebojša Pop-Tasić

Karpotrotter is a road movie about place, time, and memory, as well as an homage to filmmaker Karpo Godina, whose work flourished during the Black Wave of Yugoslav filmmaking in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Contemporary filmmaker Matjaz Ivanisin retraces the footsteps, 40 years later, of his compatriot’s road trip through small villages in the rural countryside. Constructed from Godina’s 8mm footage from this journey, Ivanisin interlaces this material with landscape footage from his current road trip and contemporary interviews of the citizenry who recall Godina’s visit decades earlier; period folkloric music augments the soundtrack. The filmmaker structures his film in five sections that articulate the local character of different villages. Richly multi-layered in both temporal and spatial terms, the filmmaker constructs a poignant meditation about the local village culture and inhabitants of this rural region of the former Yugoslavia.

Boris Robič is, as we say, an ordinary kind of bloke. One evening, however, someone tries to shoot him. The investigations reveal nothing. No enemies, no suspects. You could say that Boris is the last person anyone would want to kill. After the police close the investigation, Boris decides to make his own inquiries. As he searches for the suspect, we see the tragi-comedy unfold of a man who discovers that a lot more people hate him than he ever realized and that the way he sees his own life was an illusion.

The film follows a passenger train traveling from Belgrade in Serbia to Bar in Montenegro. The train is stopped by armed Serbian paramilitary forces at a small station in Štrpci in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Having received a tip off that there are Muslim passengers on the train, they found 19 of them, took them off the train, and executed them shortly after the train departed. About 500 passengers witnessed the event, but no one dared to stand up to them, except for one man, a retired military officer Tomo Buzov, on his way to visit his son.

Marija, Boko, Irena and other neighbours have a picnic in front of their apartment building. Suddenly a jet-fighter flies overhead. Later Peter, who flew this plane and is the son of Irena and Boko, formerly an officer in the Yugoslav Peoples Army, also arrives. Four years later the war for Slovenia breaks out and Yugoslavia is falling apart. Marjan and Bokos families, which used to be on friendly terms, are now inimical. Marjan wants to shoot the soldiers of the Yugoslav Army with an air gun, and Boko does not know what to do. Things get worse, Peter calls from the airport and an air-raid alarm forces them to seek refuge in a bomb shelter. But Marjan does not want Irena and Boko there, as they are supposed to be enemies of Serbia. Someone burns the Yugoslav flag and everyone has to run outside, while jet fighters are already flying over the apartment buildings.

Brothers joint apartment will become too small for both of them and all their loves and whose experiences they drew material for the series.