Pretty Village, Pretty Flame, a very controversial film from former Yugoslavia, Serbia, is the first film produced from Belgrade in which war crimes are also committed by Serbians. The main action is based on an eye-witness account of a platoon that was stuck in a tunnel for ten days in the winter of 1992. Dragojevi+a+’ Platoon-like war report was shot in the war zone, in the tunnel itself. Hostilities ended while the film was being made.The director switches almost imperceptibly between different periods. In the latter days of Tito, in the early eighties, he shows two friends watching the construction of the ‘Peace Tunnel’. One is a Serb, the other a Moslem – Bosnians who were to go in different directions ten years later when war broke out. After the battle for the tunnel and the escape, the war is not yet over for the wounded survivors, Serbs and Moslems, brought together in a hospital in Belgrade. Everything races on their minds. An impressive film that sometimes changes tone in just a few seconds: from brutal violence to lyricism or irony.’Wilder in its black humour than MASH, bolder in its vision of politics and the military than any movie Stanley Kubrick has made, the new Yugoslav film is one of the most audacious antiwar statements ever committed to the big screen” (Variety)
