无护照的混乱：一部关于贝尔格莱德男子佐兰的纪录片

‘He is, in simple terms, a man who destroys everything.’

In this entertaining short documentary from the Czech filmmaker Maja Penčič, truth and myth collide in the figure of Zoran, a former resident of a block of flats in Belgrade, Serbia, whose larger-than-life personality and convoluted biography have left behind accounts that can’t be reconciled. Penčič sets out to find Zoran, or at least to understand who he was, by surveying the people who claim to have known him at different stages of his life. Throughout, a rotating cast of acquaintances characterise him as everything from ‘warm’, ‘intelligent’ and ‘exceptional’ to someone who ‘never feels shame’ to, quite simply, ‘a dick’. The home-video aesthetic lends the proceedings an intimacy and a faintly surreal quality that evokes the imperfections of memory. The film never settles on a single version of events, instead watching the details rearrange themselves around a few fixed points, until what is left is less a man than a cautionary tale.