• Ivan Ikić

    Still from Barbarians (2014)

  • Ivan Ikić

    Still from Barbarians (2014)

  • Ivan Ikić

    Still from Barbarians (2014)

  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DE_KD2DbEc4

    Trailer for Barbarians (2014)

Ivan Ikić

With his powerfully raw first fiction feature Barbarians, a winner at last month’s Crossing Europe festival in Linz, Ivan Ikić has milked teen angst in his grim industrial hometown on the edge of Belgrade. For football supporter and taciturn hothead Luka, it’s a world of little consolation and simmering nationalism with a moral vacuum explicitly tied to recent history’s trauma, in which he’s under the rough thumb of older hooligans and mobile phone cameras are used to record sexual conquest for macho posturing. It’s a social media-heavy world of troubled youth first explored in compatriot Maja Milos’ controversial 2012 Rotterdam-winner Clip, and shows Ikić as another talent attuned to Serbian youth.