This film used to be called Powder Keg, and still is called that in Serbian, but for the English audience it had to change its name. The reason was that Kevin Costner, in his old, uninventful days, chose to make a film by the name of Powder Keg and sued the makers of this film.
This film is a step away from Paskaljevic's previous work Someone Else's America, which was worm and fuzzy and told as a beautiful fairy tale. It is a scream of agony of the country that was very briefly in war, technically, but by having its former parts in a bloody conflict for a decade now, had to accept millions of refugees and use its energy to help them. It is a film about a country where anyone who takes a weapon has a right to call themselves a Lord and has an ability to kill, just because they fancy it, where nothing but violence made the rich, from where people are fleeing faster than from any country in the world. This film is about darkness that has taken over my former homeland (Big and Small Yugoslavia). One New York critic complained that it was hard for him to understand which side are the characters in the film on, thus proving that he completely missed the point, there are no sides now, just as there never was any, it was all a purest version of complete anarchy where nothing was built, nothing gained, everyone was losing.
The movie is a series of interlocking stories, each bleaker than the other, with a same kind of male characters having the same qualities, an alcoholic, middle aged man, who roams through life killing whoever he doesn't like, belching, swearing, terorizing women, simply, being a murderous pig. Now the thing must be known here, swearing and rakia - Serbian national alcoholic drink is an important part of the character of the nation, just as the wine is so closely related to the French, so drinking and swearing really play a minor role there, they are just taken to build upon, to take the characters to its ridiculous edge that these last wars have taken them. There are some arguments about comparison between Slobodan Milosevic and every male character within
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