International premiere

LITTLE RED RIDING HOOD

Crvenkapa

Le petit chaperon rouge

Zoran Tairovi

SERBIA
2009
Colour
Béta SP
25’46

Original version
Serbian
Subtitles
English
Music
Zoran Tairovic
Photography
Vlada Rasic
Sound
Vladimir Guzina
Editing
Nemanja Savic

Production, distribution
Academic Film Center of “Students’ City” Cultural Center

Cast
Aunt Vera, Bozidar, Rule, Sanja

Filmography
INVISIBLE HOUSE, 2002
SANDOKAN NIKOLIC LIVE TRUTH , 2000
PAGAN ORATORIUM, 1999

“There was a poor gypsy with a patch of land...,” we hear in the beginning. A fairytale, where it is a question of a lost harvest. Then another, famous: “Little Red Riding Hood, etc.” If the eponymous tale serves as an obvious framework, it is not certain that the univocal rules here so serenely, because here all this little world disguised with costumes places the fairytale against a background with obvious but coded historical references. With no embarrassment, we find rubbing shoulders: a Nazi, an old toothless musician as the “eternal” gypsy, and a Nina escaped from Chekhov’s The Seagull landing on a highway in unwinding her monologue, a modernized little red riding hood, hitchhiking in a miniskirt, and many more colorful characters. But these characters painted in bright colors also correspond to an impure writing, where a carnivalesque blending is law: ludicrous cabaret scenes, shadow theatres, false interviews, a video game, without forgetting the use of languages, from English to German, from Romany to Serbian, which are superimposed and overlap in a rather restless polyphony. It is thus under the auspices of a Baroque distance that the Serbian Zoran Tairovic has chosen to place Crvenkapa. In his version of the tale will be understood (at the very least) that it is a matter of translating a national history with numerous ramifications and among them, those of the gypsies. That a classical clarity finds itself heckled by such an ambition is hardly surprising. The need to interpret this abundant chaos or to rejoice in it, this is what Zoran Tairovic suggests, and he dares to give to a people and its history a Harlequin body, outside of all conventional imaginings

Jean-Pierre Rehm