Yugo Florida, TV series veteran Vladimir Tagić’s feature film directorial debut, celebrated its world premiere during the 31st edition of the Sarajevo Film Festival that wraps up on Friday.
The title of the father-son drama refers to a car model, which is somewhat of a mirror of the state of its protagonist. Just check out the synopsis: “Zoran’s awkward, almost pointless life – which features a pothead roommate, an unavailable ex-girlfriend, and a job on reality TV – is turned upside down when his estranged and intolerable father is diagnosed with a terminal illness and Zoran commits himself to helping him through his final weeks.”
Tagić wrote the screenplay with Milan Ramšak Marković. The cast features popular Serbian TV comedian Andrija Kuzmanović, Nikola Pejaković, Snježana Sinovčić Šiškov, and Goran Slavić.
The Serbian director sat down with THR in Sarajevo to discuss the inspirations for the movie, the car and reality TV references, and his next film idea.
Going from TV series to film wasn’t a big leap for Tagić. “The movies are the thing that I always wanted to do,” he shared. “I just needed a lot of time to finance the movie. It’s not that easy, especially when you are a first-time director, to find financing. That’s why I just grabbed the chance to work on TV shows when I got the chance.”
His own experiences inspired the movie. “One year before my father got sick and died, an uncle of mine was sick, and I went to the hospital to visit him, and I thought, ‘Oh, my God, I’m not ready for my parents to get sick’,” he recalled. “And then, three or four months later, my father got sick. And during the last six months of his life, I experienced the strongest feelings that I have ever experienced.”
Continued the filmmaker: “Your whole world is going upside down, and you have this illusion in your head that you are maybe learning something for life. That’s the way our brain functions. We want to make sense out of everything. We want to find the reason. So, you’re telling yourself that this has to have a meaning. ‘I will become a better person. I will understand to appreciate life more. I will be a better son to my mother, or better brother to my sister or better boyfriend to my girlfriend,’ whatever. But that’s an illusion. That is not true.”
Tagić realized that he had never seen a movie tackle this “idea that a painful experience doesn’t mean that it’s a learning experience. Maybe it’s just pain, and it’s okay to accept that.” Explained the director: “Zoran is this guy who is searching for a way to change his life, to find the meaning to. He’s saying [at one point in the movie]: ‘I’m more mature now.’ But in the end, he realizes that he’s not really.”
Making Yugo Florida helped the creator. “That was something I needed to do to let it out,” he highlighted. “That was my kind of catharsis. I think that this process helped me to let it go and to continue with my life. That experience for me was cathartic in a way, because I’m not a guy who’s going to go to psychotherapy.”
‘Yugo Florida’
Courtesy of Sarajevo Film Festival
So, what’s up with the title Yugo Florida? It turns out that is the name of a hatchback car model from Yugoslav automaker Zastava that was produced between 1987 and 2008. “The car has such an exotic name,” Tagić said. “In that name, you are putting Yugoslavia and Florida right next to each other, and it’s a strange combination. What is Yugo fucking Florida? That name was just so funny to me. It’s absurd because it sounds exotic, but it’s the shittiest car in the world.”
It may want to inspire the sunny beaches of Florida and the heat of Miami, “but essentially, it’s the shittiest, crappiest car in the world,” he concluded. “So for me, that was the perfect metaphor for my main characters and their lives. Their lives are full of imperfections, full of things that they don’t understand and problems that they cannot fix, and they don’t know why. And that car is like that.”
Zoran’s reality TV job is a reference to the filmmaker’s personal life. “That was the job that I did right after I finished film school,” Tagić told THR. “I was doing Big Brother reality. And those long night shifts, which you see in the movie, drove me completely crazy. I was in some perpetual state of insomnia,” just like Zoran.
“His main problem is loneliness,” the director continued. “And Paul Schrader, the famous screenwriter I really admire, says what a job in a movie represents and how, when he’s writing a character, he’s thinking about the job that he’s doing as a metaphor for the inner problem of that character. It’s the same thing in Taxi Driver or American Gigolo or First Reformed. So I was thinking what is the perfect job to represent the loneliness of a main character, and then it just clicked – it’s perfect to have a guy who is watching other people, including when they sleep, in black-and-white.”
Tagić already has a new movie idea and screenplay with his Yugo Florida writing partner. “It’s a story that is, in a way, a mirror to this story,” he told THR. “This story was about my relationship with my father, and the next one is going to be about the relationship between my mother and my sister. So I’m going to make the female version of Yugo Florida. I mean, it’s going to be a completely different movie, but, in my head, it’s like a duo. There is a kind of connection.”