Hamlet

This drama about a young Romani man named Hamlet is based on William Shakespeare’s famous play. Formally, however, it bears reminiscences of the Yugoslavian ‘black wave movement’ from the sixties with its realistic and poetic films about Roma.
The plot takes place on a city garbage dump, and its characters are Roma who live in a colony near Belgrade. Two conflicting gangs, Orthodox and Muslim, fight over the control of the distribution of garbage. They live in present-day Serbia. The winter is harsh, Shakespeare’s castles are dilapidated ‘houses’ built in a night. This drama shows the evil in people, their intolerance and their cheating. After his brother’s death, Jova marries his late brother’s wife Yelena (Hamlet’s mother) and takes over a gang controlling the trade on the dump. The ghost of Hamlet’s father wanders about on the dump seeking revenge. Hamlet discovers that his uncle murdered his father and finds himself in the centre of a tragedy nobody will survive.
Except for two professional actors all the characters are played by Roma, many of them acting for the first time – and speaking their own language, always exceptional in films about Roma. This film can be seen as an epilogue to the IFFR 2004 programme Once We Were Birds: Romani Cinema. (LC)

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