Bal-Can-Can (2005)

Best movie of this year hands down!

I wanted to but couldn't!

It's an amazing and heartbreaking story.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

I've just watched the movie, it leaves strong impressions. It's not the first movie about Balcans for me, but it's one of the best I've ever seen. It touches hard and delicate topics, it's one of the few movies who is mentioning Kosovo.It is a trip through the countries of ex-Jugoslavia that have been involved in the war in the last 20 years: Macedonia, Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia, Kosovo with some other near countries as Italy and Bulgaria.The movie follows a style that can be considered typical for ex-Yugoslavian movies: in the beginning is very funny, but it slowly starts to change into something much more serious. I think that the mixture between funny and tragic, between comedy and drama is very well done; this movie could be a masterpiece.It gives a particular and touching view on the human disaster that happened there. The soundtrack includes beautiful Macedonian music and you can hear a lot of different languages: Serbian, Macedonian, Italian, Albanian, Russian...I won't say anything about the final scenes, just: I HOPE IT'S NOT TRUE and it's pure fiction!!

9/10Ruza and her husband Trendafil Karanfilov live together with "baba Zumbula" (granny Zumbula). Even though they have names like flowers, their life is no picnic. They can hardly afford the food for a food fight. But they have even bigger problem; the war is starting in their country. As much as they are unhappy with the war, their neighbor Dzango Sapun couldn't be more happier. Under his slogan "For fatherland everything!" Dzango tries to enroll Trendafil into the army. Trendafil is not much of a military man. So he and his wife are planning to escape to neighboring Bulgaria. During the escape baba Zumbula dies, and what's even worse her body is missing. Now, Trendafil is on the journey, trying to find the missing granny. At his side is Santino Genovese. Santino has never met Trendafil before, but he is helping in an attempt to repay his father's debt to Trendafil's father.Movie uses stereotypes about people in neighboring Balkan countries to tell the story of their journey. And the stereotype are used in a rather funny way. My favorite was a "businessman" (war criminal) from Belgrade who goes jogging while shooting from his gun and with an orchestra behind him.If you aren't familiar with situation in ex-Yugoslavia you are going to miss some points of the movie, but still; worth watching.9/10

I must say I am a lover of Macedonian culture, especially music and film. That is probably one of the reasons why I expected so much and got so little from this. This one turned out to be a sheer disappointment.First of all, the script is, well...bad. The characters have zero believability and the "plot" is garbage. (Chasing a carpet with a dead granny all over Balkan countries until it is found in Kosovo may sound interesting until you actually see it. It just doesn't work.) The symbolism is either shallow or far-fetched. The acting is not so bad, but unfortunately nothing much could be done with the terrible script. Directing was not so bad either but then, there was that element of what I would call snobbery (both in the script and directing)that I absolutely detested.Maybe this could have been a good movie, unfortunately it is not. It made me watch again the beautiful Macedonian movie "Before the Rain" just to forget this disaster as soon as possible.Normally, I would give it 3/10, however I think the current IMDb rating is very unrealistic, so I'm giving it 1/10.

I have been wanting to see this movie for a while now and I must say I was not disappointed. I found it to be very funny in a very weird way. I love the two main characters Trendafil Karanfilov played by Vlado Jovanovski and Santino Genovese played by Adolfo Margiotta. NOt really speaking the same language as each other, it was interesting to watch them go on in the search of that carpet. I found the mutual understanding between them to be very interesting and well put despite the language barrier. Personanly I think it worked well. I think it's well worth watching. Cheers:)