Credited cast: | |||
Slobodan Milosevic | ... | Self - President of Serbia (archive footage) | |
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Boris Tadic | ... | Self - President of Serbia |
Josip Broz Tito | ... | Self - President of Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (archive footage) | |
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Nicolas Wagnières | ... | Self - Director and Narrator (voice) |
In this emotional documentary and political allegory, the film's Swiss director Nicolas Wagnières, who spent his childhood summers in his mother's native country of Yugoslavia, tells the sad history of Hotel Jugoslavija (Hotel Yugoslavia), the most luxurious hotel ever built in the Yugoslav capital of Belgrade during the communist rule, which then suffered the same fate as the country that built it. Through his nostalgic personal testimony, old movie and news clips and commercials, and new interviews with his mother and several people who ran it over the decades, the narrator-director commemorates both the hotel, his semi-idealistic view of Yugoslav socialism and the no-longer-existent country he loved as a child, but also warns of the pitfalls of capitalism and cronyism.
I think this documentary is not for everyone. It's an artistic piece and i love the fact that it doesn't go too deep in to the history of it. It rather shows a timeline of the Hotel - the beginning, during Tito's time, time of Tito's death, pre war time, war time, after war time and today. I think the director is trying to show the Hotel as a symbol of a short era that was Jugoslavija and raises a question what it represents today. The answer to this question he leaves to the viewers.