Judging this movie is impossible without mentioning some background information. It's been banned shortly after the premiere and the director jailed for a couple of years. After more than two decades in the vaults, Plastic Jesus has been re-released.
The movie is a mixture of feature film and archive footage, the approach championed by more famous contemporaries such as Makavejev and Zilnik. The story is potent and well developed, including some full frontal male nudity, allegedly first of its kind in Yugoslav cinema.
It is presumably the archive footage that provoked regime's harsh reaction. In particular, some sequences imply equality between all major parties involved in the conflicts in former Yugoslavia during the Second World War (communist partisans or "the winners", openly Nazi Croatian Ustasha and Chetniks - Serbian nationalists). Although this might sound harmless from the standpoint of contemporary history and politics, it's been an unspeakable heresy at the time of film's release.
With more feature film and less documentary we would have probably remembered Plastic Jesus as a classic. Like this, we've been left with another story of dissidence in a Communist state.
The movie is a mixture of feature film and archive footage, the approach championed by more famous contemporaries such as Makavejev and Zilnik. The story is potent and well developed, including some full frontal male nudity, allegedly first of its kind in Yugoslav cinema.
It is presumably the archive footage that provoked regime's harsh reaction. In particular, some sequences imply equality between all major parties involved in the conflicts in former Yugoslavia during the Second World War (communist partisans or "the winners", openly Nazi Croatian Ustasha and Chetniks - Serbian nationalists). Although this might sound harmless from the standpoint of contemporary history and politics, it's been an unspeakable heresy at the time of film's release.
With more feature film and less documentary we would have probably remembered Plastic Jesus as a classic. Like this, we've been left with another story of dissidence in a Communist state.
