The Optimists

These five stories set in contemporary Serbia reflect the atmosphere much more than the reality of the post-Milošević era – a mix of hope and lost illusions, truth and lies, fiction and real events. Thus it isn't easy to tell just who is offering selfless assistance, as in the first story, and who, on the other hand, is fishing around in the murky waters of their family's and friends' misery, as in the case of the last tale. Each one is a fragment of a mosaic, pieced together by the character of the actor Lazar Ristovski, playing five different roles, and reliably secured with an unswerving angle of vision. The director was inspired by a definition of optimism that Voltaire expressed through his Candide, namely "the mania for insisting that all is well when all is by no means well". In the spirit of this premise, the filmmakers – Goran and Vladimir Paskaljević (father and son) – moulded their human figures with comic hyperbole and a good dose of black humour. The Optimists will make the audience laugh as well as cry, because that's the way life is. (Karlovy Vary International Film Festival)