Tilva Roš

Tilva Roš is a 2010 Serbian coming of age drama directed by Nikolai Ležaic, following a group of skaters from Bor, a small mining town in eastern part of Serbia, during their first summer after finishing high school.

Toda and Stefan are the best friends, skaters, who spend their first summer after finishing high school. Stefan's going to Belgrade to the University in fall while Toda stays back home. They spend time shooting "Jackass-like" videos and hanging out
with Dunja, who came back from France for her holidays, and get into a quiet battle for her attention. In that strange relationship of dying friendship and rivalry they try to get ahead of each other.

Normally I am not so into the Jackass-like movies but Tilva Roš is special. It was very funny and also touching now and then.
The refreshing thing about this film is the fact that it’s a Balkan film with no mention of the war, but instead shows what life is like in modern-day Serbia. You can see Tilva Roš until sunday 10th of April, during Made in Europe film festival.
http://www.madeineurope.nu/


Directors (Nikolai Ležaic) visual style & influences
Since I was born and raised in Bor, I had this mixed feeling towards the place, because Bor is in Serbia a symbol of a destroyed industry. It is partly fair to say so, but I never pictured it in my head like some East European post-industrial wasteland.
I never felt as I lived in some ugly sinkhole ghost town, on contrairy, I always felt as it was the most beautiful place on earth. And because of the mine tailings that surround the town it always reminded me of Arizona desert. It's not new to search for the
beauty where people usually don't look for it, so I had a very clear refference in the legendary american photographer William Eggleston's work. His photos of US midwest wastelands look as the most beautiful memory a person could have. While looking at them I had the exact same feeling as when watching some landscape back home. Films like Gummo, My own private Idaho, Thumbsucker were all kind of visual and emotional refferences of what kind of feeling I wanted to make.


Skate Team Kolos group photo 2009.

Skate team "Kolos" is a skate group created in June 2005. by Stefan Đorđević, Marko Todorović and Marko Milenković as its only members. In next couple of years they spread their interest in skateboarding to younger kids and the team grew rapidly. In 2005. there were only few skaters in Bor but up until 2010. the number grew to around 30. Almost all of them appear in Tilva Roš, and the team is often referenced in the film. Most of them were underage during the production. Together with Skate Team "Zglob" from Negotin and Shorty, graffiti artist from Zaječar, they form KZS (Kolos Zglob Shorty), a kind of eastern Serbian skate alliance numbering more than 50 skaters. In late 2009. skate team Kolos registered NGO in order to gather funds needed for creating a skate park in Bor. (source wikipedia)

TILVA ROŠ OFFICIAL TRAILER