Train Driver’s Diary

A mordant feature that was Serbia’s submission for the 2016 Academy Awards, filmmaker Milos Radovic’s tragicomedy centers on people being run over in great numbers by trains. Gore is never shown explicitly, but the gruesome topic obsesses the railyard protagonists. Ilija (Lazar Ristovski) is an old engineer, accepting with resigned regret the many people killed by locomotives that he manned (including an entire gypsy troupe). He adopts an abandoned boy who tried to kill himself by lying on the tracks, but the now young-adult Sima (Petar Kora) defies the old man’s wishes, becoming an apprentice train driver himself. Even so, Sima is an anxious youth, petrified of the time when he will himself run over his first casualty. How he loses his "virginity" (in both senses) propels the somewhat slack but consistently wry and witty narrative. Recommended. (C. Cassady)