The Professional

Teja runs a publishing house; he used to teach at the university, he wrote, and he was a dissident under Milošević. One day a man he does not know comes into his office with a large suitcase. His name is Luka; he was an officer of the State Security service and is now a taxi driver. In the case are ten years of surveillance: Teja's conversations, recordings, what he wrote and texts that were never published. Luka has come to hand them over. Dušan Kovačević writes and directs, from his own play of 1990. Bora Todorović plays Luka. The idea is that the two men are bound together. Luka watched Teja for ten years and in that time became the person who knew him best; the dissident and the officer who followed him have shared the same life. The tone is black comedy. The subject is surveillance and repression; the telling jokes continuously and uses the bitter humour known in Serbian cinema. The film is built as a retrospective look at the Milošević period and talks about who did what after the regime came apart. The structure is largely a single location and does not hide its theatrical source; the conversation between the two men makes up nearly the whole film. It was nominated for seven awards and won five. Who it is for: viewers who like Balkan black comedy and films that settle with a political past. Who it is not for: it rests entirely on dialogue, some jokes are lost without the local political context, and the pace is slow.