At the 30th Sarajevo Film Festival, Srđan Vuletić presents his third feature film, Gym. The director, who garnered numerous awards with his debut Summer in the Golden Valley, including the Golden Tiger in Rotterdam, returns with a film that revisits a formula that once brought him success.
Gym, like Summer in the Golden Valley, is a film that focuses on the youth and their lives in Sarajevo. Teenagers growing up in the despair of post-war Bosnia and Herzegovina in Gym become young people trying to survive and find meaning in a city shaken by transition and corruption. The dialogues in the film are filled with jargon and attempt to convey the aimless lives of young people who have no ambitions for themselves but also do not wish for others to progress. To make matters worse, even the guests from the European Union, artists, do not bring a more positive image. Their lives, as well as their “art,” are completely trivial and indicate that the “hope for a better tomorrow” that the EU represents is, in fact, meaningless.
Vuletić raises the question of morality once again, just as he did in his two previous films. This time, morality seems even more relative than before. In dissecting the society in which he lives, the director leads us to the conclusion that morality, as a form of social conscience, cannot exist in a city where society is rotting from within. Young man who would turn the world upside down to defend the honour of a deceased father no longer exist; random passers-by do not rescue women, and a happy ending, even if illusory, no longer exists. What remains are only corrupt middle-aged people, aggressive youth, and “innocents” who pull out guns.
