Good Bye, 20th Century!

Zbogum Na Dvaesetiot Vek is a dark, surrealistic tale of the Balkan. It reaches over a period of one hundred years and goes back and forth between the future, the past and the present. The fi I m starts in the apocalyptic future of 2019, where we meet a young warrior who is executed by his own for blaspheming one of the clan's female goddesses. The film makes a short stop in 1919, to show in an insane black and white segment that society was no less violent then and ends in a depraved New Years-celebration in 1999, when the abyss is ahead of us.
The people we meet are violent, demoralized and cruel. Quotingthefilm'ssubtitle Santa Claus places the curse on humanity - The future is as screwed up
as the past - people do not deserve a new and better millennium.
It is hardly possible to make a simple categorization of Zbogum Na Dvaesetiot Velr. It can probably best be described as an anarchistic science fiction-saga with a violent description of the war in former Yugoslavia - a mixture between Stalker, Star Wars and A Clockwork Orange.
And the fact that the young friends and directors, Popovski and Mitrevski, have spent a lot of time making comic books and rock concerts, is quite evident.
The different parts of the film are linked together in one great hallucination with the dark themes; violence, chaos and doom through the last century in an restless Macedonia. But thanks to the comic book character and the anarchistic framing, the film does not seem completely pitch dark.
ISAK WESTERSTRÖM

Premiärstatus
Världspremiär: Orig. titel
Zbogum Na Dvaesettiot Vek: Medverkande
Lazar Ristovski,Nikola Ristanovski,Vlado Jovanovski: Producent
Darko Mitrevski: Manus
Darko Mitrevski: Foto
Vladimir Samoilovski: Musik
Risto Vrtev: Talat språk
Macedonian