Description

Timeline: late 1990s, Serbia. Young Marko lives for cinema and is desperate to make a feature film. Fresh ideas are in no shortage, but financing in post-Milosevic Serbia is next to impossible to secure. In desperation to shoot anything interesting, he ventures into the universe of porn, where financing is a breeze and profits are all but guaranteed. He assembles a colourful band of outcasts and proceeds to shoot porn as a vessel of rage against a culture that won’t let him make the movies he wants to make. Eventually, he takes things one step further, abandoning his shoots in order to assemble a travelling “porno cabaret” which goes from village to village across rural Serbia, performing live sex acts in radical framings as a means of sexual confrontation. This leads to… a lot of trouble with the locals! But trouble is just an appetizer, and things really begin to explode when Marko and his troupe are approached by a shady foreign journalist who makes them an offer they struggle against refusing—a ton of money in exchange for shooting actual murders, theatrically “performed” on willing, consensual victims who no longer care about living.

A razor-sharp and often perversely comic metaphor about the social pathologies of Serbian life in the 1990s, PORNO GANG is, on the surface, precisely the sort of work you might expect to encounter from a filmmaker who cites modern Japanese cinema, American horror, John Waters and Paul Morrissey as his influences, fused with aesthetics of the Serbian Black Wave. Scratch a little deeper and you’ll find a fiercely intelligent, wholly unique blast of ultra-explicit assault art. This is a film bursting with outrageous characters and shocking situations, yet there’s an incredible sense of loss and anger attached to it, oozing forth from the deepest of wounds. A different kind of road movie, it’s the place where MAN BITES DOG crosses paths with CAFÉ FLESH, EASY RIDER and PINK FLAMINGOS on a candy-coloured suicide bus to hell. With this film, writer/director Mladen Djordjevic joins ranks with Gaspar Noé, Sion Sono, Lars Von Trier and Takashi Miike as one of the most daring and provocative filmmakers working today. PORNO GANG is a perfect introduction to the scorching new wave of transgressive Serbian cinema, one that will make you laugh, cringe and cry tears of blood. Absolutely for adults only!

—Mitch Davis