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Written in fRoots issue 325, 2010
 

DVD

VARIOUS
Golden Brass Summit – FiestaMania!
Network 495127 (2009)

2006 brought two similarly-titled films set in the huge brass festival in the little central Serbian village of Guca: the documentary Guca directed by Milivoj Ilic, and Guca!, a love story featuring young trumpeter Marko Markovic in the Romeo role. This new DVD is neither documentary nor story, but a retrospective compiled from many hours of video recordings made at the festival from 2001 to 2009.
      It is in effect a slideshow, a very long (86 minute) series of mostly 2-3 second clips with the accompaniment of several numbers by various bands, and a large amount of camera panning within those brief clips, and the fact that apart from the continuous overlaid brass soundtrack the clips don’t have their own live sound means that it comes across as an endless scene-setting trailer.
      The notes give an indication of some of the points it intends to make, including, after the opening 54-minute film FiestaMania! the shorter Chochek Of Happiness, showing the band Ekrem playing in a Roma mahala and up to their waists in water, which apparently addresses the authorities’ failure to utilise for home heating the natural hot springs in that region of south Serbia. The third film focuses on a mass of clips of people dancing kolo, and the fourth is intended as a lament on war and destruction linked to the wood-carvings of Professor Nikola Sojic, who founded the Golden Brass Summit in 1961; but these themes and messages aren’t really apparent from simply watching. It would probably work well as something to run on the TV of a bar or kafana, but the ceaseless edits and lack of storyline threads to follow make it a tough sit-down-and-watch unless one was there and is looking for remembered moments or faces.
      www.networkmedien.de


© 2010 Andrew Cronshaw
 

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