Sin

An intense dramatization of an adopted son with strong principles who explodes more and more drastically while facing the challenges of betrayal, bullying, and his own insecurity. The background is Sarajevo 20 years after the war, where the stresses of a fragile society that has never found any kind of real peace intermingle with the normal tensions of being a modern-day teen faced with typical modern-day problems. The son, Arman, feels everything intensely, violently, and keeps almost blowing it completely as he interacts with his parents, grandparents, teachers, brother, mates, girlfiend, and bullies. But he has a tender side too. The acting is all superb, Sarajevo is almost a character in the film, and I was drawn into the movie, feeling like a family member hoping against hope that he wouldn't finally go too far.

Someone's upset by bad reviews and keeps reporting that they contain spoilers even though they don't. Neither this nor the review below contain any spoilers, so feel free to read them.

It goes to show how desperately they want to portray this as a good movie and deter people from reading reviews that they don't like.

Anyway, I just saw this movie at the Sarajevo Film Festival opening night and it was bad, it was really bad.

There is no plot, acting was horrible, especially by the main character (at times it reminded me of The Room! It was that bad), some of the side roles had 10 times better acting than the lead.

Characters lack background or any substance whatsoever, we never learn anything about anyone, they have no emotions or if they do them (and yes, they really "do" emotions in this film, they don't have them), it is so exaggerated and out of place that it just doesn't look convincing. You just keep asking yourself who these characters are and why they are here.

You suddenly get a scene where they introduce a new character and you think, okay something might be happening and the character disappears never to be seen again.

Most of the shots are still, camera rarely moves anywhere, there are no closeups or filming from different angles, the shots are so unnecessarily long and dull. Locations keep changing constantly. They use at least three apartments that are so obviously different and try to present them as the same place. It's so clearly visible that it's not the same apartment.

Some of the scenes look like they were used to fill the empty parts to make the movie long enough.

It seems like the idea was to introduce different parts of Sarajevo and Bosnian culture and somehow try to come up with a story that would fill in the gaps between tourist ads of Sarajevo. All in all, it's very disappointing. Bosnia has so many good movies and this is not one of them.

After the movie, there was a short speech and someone, I am not sure who, (maybe the host?) made a very funny self-patting comment, she said that the movie was obviously very good because majority of people remained in their seats. No one was interested in hearing anything the crew had to say about the movie. People started leaving right after the screening, it was kind of sad.

Don't skip it, watch it, just to see what a bad movie looks like.

For some, it's probably heavy for watching, because it is a movie that frames almost usual and real story. As the movie should be. I'm fascinated by the beauty of the director's gentle and still so gravely approach to telling the story bout one country, manhood and family all living from the scratch each minute, as their life and the movie goes on.

Finaly something that isnt war related, great plot, something fresh from Bosnia. This is the direction where BiH cinematografy should go....👍