Buick Riviera

Directed by Goran Rusinovic, 2008

Review by Rada Djurica

Buick Riviera received the 2008 Heart of Sarajevo Award at the Sarajevo Film Festival for Best Actor. It tells the story of a couple of Bosnians, a Serb and a Muslim, from two different ethnicities with the same Bosnian roots, their destinies tangled in a lonely life in the USA. The film culminates in a psychological argument around one meaningless old car, a Buick. This ethnic=based argument comes alive over the course of just one day.

Basically, this is a skillful, low-budget psychological drama, and it is set in the middle of nowhere in America. It's both a realistic and unrealistically ruthless wordplay, both a drama and a road movie. What I like most about Buick Riviera is that it is a visual powerful cinematic piece of work. Its endlessly white idyllic winter represents the lonely alliance that Hasan (Slavko Stimac) feels with the USA, in a powerful visual contrast with Hasan's memory of the civil war in Bosnia.

The screenplay for this film was based on the book written by Miljenka Jergovica, from Sarajevo, who is now living in Zagreb.