With his woolly grey beard and slovenly appearance, no one recognises Dejan Stanic as the one-time war hero/criminal. A simple excuse is enough for him to be able to move around an isolated mountain village in relative peace; he pretends to be an old friend of one of the inhabitants, Slavko, whom he supposedly met many years ago at a health resort. Slavko’s house is his last hiding place before Dejan finally leaves the country. The loneliness forces him to start thinking, for the very first time, about his own past. Bakur Bakuradze grew up in Georgia and studied in Russia. He bases his protagonist loosely on the Bosnian-Serbian General Ratko Mladic, but he doesn’t seem to be interested in politics or issues such as good and evil. Much more important in his sober and observing story is the question: Can a man like Stanic really start to understand in his last years of life?
