Midwinter Night's Dream

Besides not trusting the camera, i.e. not trusting their own eyes, the sign of unconfident directors is also the distrust of the story. Goran Paskaljevic’s “Midwinter Night’s Dream (San Zimske Noci)” is the product of a director not trusting his story to say whatever he wanted to say. It is a simple set up: three damaged people came together to symbolize a damaged nation. It is a very workable premise. All the director has to do is to set it up and let the story do its work. Paskaljevic, however, does not have confidence in the story itself. Instead he tried to explain it to us with dialogues. When the story is telling us all we need to know, the added dialogues become preachy and condescending. It is sad to see this film because Paskaljevic’s last film Cabaret Balkan was one of my favourite films of the Vancouver International Film Festival of 1999. Maybe he just ran into a story with which he did not feel comfortable.