The Steel Mill Café

Erna and Dževad are the owners of the café at the bus stop near the entrance to the ironworks, which was once one of the largest in Eastern Europe. The film uses the observational technique to record their pub talks during the last week before the café's final closure. From these conversations, a new utopia of former socialist laborers emerges: how to get hold of Germany, the only remaining paradise on earth.

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"We live among the ruins. Visible and invisible. Ruins are easy to love and even easier to admire when they are far away in time, on the horizon of a past that cannot be returned. But what about those on whom the color of transience has not yet dried off and the scent of lost ideals still lingers? One such nearby but invisible ruin was made visible by Goran Dević with his most powerful regional film The Steel Mill Café. Using the most essential possibilities of the documentary genre in a self-conscious, classicist wax, he – by observation – snatched from the inexorable grip of change an unusual place – a mausoleum of small people and small things, where the habits of a lost time have been preserved. In just one hour, emotions, ideas and values that are unstoppably slipping away from our horizon are preserved. In the last moments of the place where workers come to show and celebrate their own vulnerability and speak their truth, unexpectedly grows the comfort of knowing that the fight against oblivion is the most powerful means of reviving the faith in building on the ruins."

- Višnja Pentić