Taurunum Boy

Taurunum was the Roman name for Zemun municipality, today attached to Belgrade and very proud of its football club. The boys are like all boys: loudmouthed, stubborn, numerous. But here, under the reign of hooligan law and an ancestral virility that no one dreams of challenging, they are even more boyish. In other words, a little more divided between the bravado that their kingpin imaginary requires of them, and the feverish unease that they hope to hide under an exaggerated apathy. Taurunum Boys magnificently captures this double face of the 13- or 14-year-old boys, these rosycheeked warriors terrified by life and in no way prepared for it. Dušan Grubin and Jelena Maksimović have made this into the object of a twoscale theatre. The very wide first scale films places (abandoned boats now taken over for games, wastelands full of things to destroy, football stands and the school canteen), all of them arenas for boys who see themselves as gladiators. The second scale, close to their faces, is that of confessions, hastened by the imminence of a summer after which nothing will be the same. The film alternates these scales but also describes a fast-growing power, shifting from the already acquired fascination for the sociability of little men towards the eternal vibrato of saying goodbye to childhood.

Jérôme Momcilovic