ŽIVAN PRAVI PANK FESTIVAL

In his village near Belgrade, Zivan Pujic, aka Jimmy, is organising a punk festival alone and on a shoestring. For this sixth edition, the festival will be international as one of the bands is from Slovakia, but its stage is still the concrete slab at the sports ground, the ping pong table being removed at the last minute. As for the performers, they will help to move the rows of seats and, if need be, provide the cash to change the WC light bulb. The comic chapter inter-titles that count down to D-Day never hint of the slightest snigger or loftiness. And with good reason: the size of the film budget is doubtless close to the festival’s. As the admitted “organisational errors” accumulate, the affectionate portrait of Zivan gains in depth, enriched by an almost painful flashback revealing his now-lost youthful energy. This young man, who lives on his mother’s farm, confides to a passer-by that he had been committed to a psychiatric hospital for one month the previous winter. The quirky sociability of this discreetly destroy poet fluctuates between burlesque comic genius and the melancholy of a tormented soul. Leaving behind the programmed pathos of the situation, Zivan Makes a Punk Festival, with its Keaton-like title, also stands as an implicit and harrowing treatise on existential solitude.

Charlotte Garson