Super 8 stories

The band ‘No Smoking’ became popular in former Yugoslavia in the late 1980s. This rock group, originating from Sarajevo, used the language of the street and expressed the emotions of the young generation in Tito’s country. The lyrics were very direct and often had a political slant, mocking the regime and lifestyle of the time. The leader of the band, Dr Nelle Karajiliæ, points out that, ‘we wanted to be an anarchic punk band, but were also convinced that the universal can and must be sought in local stories and roots, and that music, even the most irregular and revolutionary, has to draw strength from local traditions.’ With the collapse of the country, the band also fell apart, but it was soon back again, reformed with new musicians and musically more influenced by Gypsy and folk songs from the Balkans. They settled in Belgrade and started to seek an international audience. The film follows the new ‘No Smoking’ band on tour. The director of the film is one of the band’s guitar players (since 1986), so he is able to present an interesting inside, as well as outside, view of the rebellious musicians. Incorporating home movies, the director takes us back into the past, when the reality on the Balkans was quite different from today. He tries to reconstruct the times in which the band started up. Recordings of concerts and interviews with the band members are nicely interpolated in the fiction sequences that have the flavour of Kusturica’s feature film Black Cat, White Cat. (International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam)