A number of very happy Serbs were packed into a tiny restaurant on New York’s Lower East Side on Saturday night, celebrating the success of their remarkable movie, “Here and There,” which two nights earlier had won the Best New York Narrative award at the Tribeca Film Festival. The restaurant, Kafana, is itself a Serbian enterprise, and director Darko Lungulov, passing the Blog a glass of Montenegrin wine, explained that he had picked it not least because of its kitchen. He said that when he wants really good Serbian food (defined as “a lot of meat” by another celebrant), he comes here – from Serbia.
Well, maybe. Lungulov, dark-eyed, long-haired, lightly bearded and wearing a pair of shoes with some sort of psychedelic landscape painted on them, is half a New Yorker himself. He studied film at CCNY in the ’90s, and after attaining his BA began directing documentaries. He moved back to Serbia six years ago, to his home town of Belgrade, where he came up with the idea and then wrote the script for “Here and There,” which is set in both cities.
The movie intertwines two stories. One concerns a young Serbian expatriate named Branko (Branislav Trifunovic) who’s chiseling out a living in Manhattan using his banged-up van for unlicensed furniture-moving jobs (something Lungulov did back in his starving-student days). Branko longs for his fiancée, Ivana (Jelena Mrdja), who’s still back in Belgrade and can’t get a visa to enter the U.S. If only he could pay someone to fly over there to marry the girl – thus securing an automatic visa -- and bring her to him. Branko puts this proposition to one of his characteristically down-and-out moving clients, a woebegone saxophone player named Robert (David Thornton). Robert is initially reluctant (“Isn’t there a war going on there?” he asks skittishly), but he’s homeless at the moment, and desperate for money, so he accepts the deal.
“Here and There” got so much love at Tribeca because, among other things, it contains two superb performances. One is by Thornton, whose minimalist portrayal of the beaten-down Robert – all gesture, gaze and unforced, shambling charm – recalls the wordless delights of silent comedy. The other knockout portrayal is by the award-winning Serbian actress Mirjana Karanovic, who plays Branko’s mother, a lovelorn woman named Olga, in the film’s Belgrade sequences. Standing outside of Kafana, where the party was spilling onto the sidewalk, Katja Siegel, one of the movie’s international array of producers, said she’d been unfamiliar with Karanovic’s work before “Here and There,” but now considers her “one of the best actresses in the world.” The Blog nodded in agreement.
Neither Karanovic nor Thornton was on hand for Saturday night’s festivities – other projects called, no doubt – but Lungulov took up the anecdotal slack. The movie was made with the usual dribs and drabs of cash from indie backers, he said, and it took quite a while to complete. At one point, it looked as if the armed conflict that Robert feared in the film might actually break out. In February 2008, just as the production was about to relocate from New York to Belgrade, the latest in the endless generations of Balkan political protesters set fire to the U.S. embassy there (and also attacked the diplomatic missions of Britain, Turkey, Bosnia and Croatia). Thornton, who was by that point working on a Nick Cassavetes movie in L.A., learned about this from a TV newscast at the Chateau Marmont, where he was staying, and, like his character in the picture, was concerned. Lungulov and his fellow Serbs assured him that everything was fine – the protesters were simple thugs on the order of garden-variety soccer hooligans. So Thornton hopped on a plane and flew off to finish the movie – and was later glad he did. Belgrade, he said in an interview with Cinemablend.com, was a fantastic place, “kind of like the East Village multiplied by a million. It’s filled with young people dying to do something creative, and probably not having a lot of outlets to do it.
Quite a few of them found work on “Here and There.” Now if the movie can just get distribution. Lungulov will soon be taking the film to Japan – an excellent place to raise money and support. But he’s already thinking ahead to his next project, a documentary this time, about a strange Serbian phenomenon in which poverty-stricken villages have taken to building statues of celebrities – Michael Jackson most notably – in their shabby town squares. The idea is to attract press attention (it’s working) and possibly some sort of monetary influx. The Blog admired the utter nuttiness of this story. “It’s amazing,” Lungulov said, unnecessarily.
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