Synopsis
Once he was King, now he is invisible. In this Balkan tragicomical documentary set in West-Berlin, the young cameraman Vuk from Belgrade embarks on the trail of his uncle Dragan Wende who used to be the street king of West-Berlin’s 1970s hedonistic disco scene. Being Yugoslav, he also profited from the Berlin Wall. Today, Vuk’s uncle is an aged bordello doorman who lives off social welfare and wants the Wall back.Seen through his nephew’s eyes, a microcosm of underdogs and their survival strategies unfolds in this intimate and entertaining underground family-tale about the ‘Losers of Change‘ in a still-divided city.
Visions de Réel 2018, FOCUS SERBIA:
The fanciful Dragan Wende, a Yugoslavian immigrant, began his career in the West Berlin of the 1970s. During the crazy years of the Ku’damm, the part of the city where all excess was allowed, he was the king of the night. With his improbable appearance, a look without hang-ups and a thick Yugoslavian accent, Dragan takes us into his past with humour and mischief. But he also lets us into his present, a little like the way in which he welcomes us in his apartment, which has become a mess that looks like a boudoir from another time. With the fall of the Wall, everything changed: the golden age of disco is over and Dragan, an ageing bachelor, now lives from small jobs and leads a life stripped of the splendours of yesteryear. He delivers a tragi-comical account that sometimes comes off like vaudeville, juxtaposing the history of Yugoslavia, a once politically emancipated country in the East, with that of Berlin, a liberated city in the West. (Jasmin Basic)