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Sivi dom - Movie Club 2018
Topic Started: Mar 5 2018, 08:24 PM (306 Views)
Mario Gaborovic
g legs' wife's lover
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Edited by Mario Gaborovic, Mar 6 2018, 02:24 AM.
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Mario Gaborovic
g legs' wife's lover
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Large portion of my very first fragments of memories date back to the spring of 1986 when I first saw Grey Home, a disturbing TV drama series about life within the walls of most known juvenile hall in Yugoslavia - Kruševac reformatory school.



Seeing children born in broken families- or no families at all- was comforting but, on the other hand, an entertaining tour-de-force in which the audience is drawn into all the horrors and troublesome experiences of young offenders, who never seem to get rid of their acquired ways of behavior despite the efforts of teachers and hall staff.

Yugoslav cinema already saw a feature film dealing with this particular subject, however Goran Marković's Special Education (which already programmed here on this site befiore) bears much more humor and even optimism about the fate of its protagonists, which can't be said about GH; from the aerial view of the facility in the beginning of each episode, accompanied by saxophone-playing blues soundtrack, until the last minutes it gives you nothing but bad feel in the stomach.

Strongly influenced by American prison movies, Sivi dom, however, often casts a glance outside of the walls: one of the key characters (played by Žarko Laušević, a charismatic Montenegrin with real life personal drama not much brighter than the role he played) is trying to get his life back to the rails - we see him finding a job, a place to live, a woman of his own... yet at each successful story, come tens or dozens of failures. There's a wide variety of characters about which I won't go in details - as Brotherdeacon already put it, GH is ever-expanding.

When it comes to education approach, I love how two antipodes are presented here: Dragan Nikolić (a well-known regional actor, best known as lead in When I am Dead and Gone) plays a teacher of kindness, a fatherly-like figure who is always ready to compromise and to not apply punishment. On the other hand, we have Mihajlo Janketić as Beli, an iron-fisted teacher with zero tolerance. Of course, we also have Velimir Bata Živoinović as the pšrincipal who is sort of a balanced personality between these two.

The script was drawn out from over 1,000 of interviews that Gordan Mihić, the screenwriter, made during his stays at local juvenile halls, while pretending to be a teacher himself in order to make offenders reveal. Initially it was supposed to be 10 epiusodes, but he and the director decided the material was just good enough to be wasted, so they expanded it to 12. The project was sponsored by UNICEF and it was the last one filmed with a camera made for feature films.

Several years ago, Sivi dom was voted as one of the three best Serbian TV shows ever made, and it enjoys an absolute cult status in the Balkans as a whole.
Edited by Mario Gaborovic, Mar 6 2018, 02:23 AM.
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Lencho of the Apes
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Let's go do some crimes
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That 11-hour run time could throw the game off schedule -- there will be some people who choose not to watch it, and the ones that watch will require more time than usual to get to the point where they're ready to talk about it.

Trying to provide 'the greatest good for the greatest number,' I'm going to give this a week in the spotlight just like all the movies have had, and bring Mauries forward on day #8. If it takes people two weeks to watch your TV series, the thread will still be here when they finish.
"The four cardinal points of the compass? In reality, there are only three: North and South."
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Mario Gaborovic
g legs' wife's lover
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As I said before, you can immediately see whether is this for you, or not. The first episode (52 minutes) sums it up all well, and if you're not impressed move on to the next film.

But so far from online friends + historically this TV show gets nothing but extremely positive reviews, it's also perfectly watchable and I just couldn't let it reside in obscurity for any longer.
Edited by Mario Gaborovic, Mar 6 2018, 04:22 PM.
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kanafani
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I watched the first episode, and I liked it. Lots of compelling actors in this large cast. The subject matter is super-bleak, and it puts an extra effort in twisting the knife in the wound. It's like it's telling the viewer: "Wake up, see what some people have to go through". There's a didactic, committed, urgent public-awareness campaign feeling to it, but I didn't find it hectoring. Will I watch the whole thing over the next week? Probably not, but I'll finish it at some point.
letterboxd
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Brotherdeacon
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It conjures willy-nilly
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I love this show, and found that many of the actors (men and women) are top notch--I come across them in subsequent features from the region. I know it sounds like a chore, but the same could be said about a short season of Twin Peaks or the Wire, or I, Claudius etc. I was intoxicated from the beginning and after a few I devoured them and was sorry it concluded. The writing at times is terrific, at worst it may become too ennobling, but I found that rare, usually it's pretty insightful and accurate stuff, can also be harrowing if not soul-piercing. IMHO.
Edited by Brotherdeacon, Mar 7 2018, 04:45 AM.
“Somebody has to do something, and it’s just incredibly pathetic that it has to be us. “
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