Ivan Velisavljević

The "Occupied Cinema" follows young activists and events surrounding the takeover of "Zvezda", one of 14 extinguished cinemas from the privatized company "Beograd Film".

A punk rock Kafka story: the disabled Son buys an amp and a guitar. He meets a girl and starts a punk band with her. At the same time, the Father finds out he has lung cancer. Being brutally cynical, one could say that while Father is fading out in the other room, the son is playing him a punk lullaby. Sense of guilt and misunderstanding prepares the final conflict…

Serbia in the 1990s had an underground scene with different characters mingling, roaming around, walking and talking. They were comic book authors, serious hard core punk fans, relatively young writers, freedom fighters, as well as intellectuals, loud NGO or Christian activists, hobos and underground posers, and probably a couple of fakers and ego-maniacs, to be honest. Everyone wrote something, cut 'n' pasted 'n' copied, reviewed concerts of their own friends, draw comics, made collages and then xeroxed all that and forwarded by mail to as many people possible. In short, it was social networking. But in those days, before Internet, the name was: fanzine-making.