A film By Goran Radovanovic
Running time: 84 min
Format: 35 mm / colour
Release date: September 2009
Genre: drama
Serbian/German/Greek co-production
Festivals and awards
Montreal World Film Festival, competition program 2009,
Antalya Film Festival, competition program (Turkey) 2009,
Montpellier (France)2009,
Mannheim (Germany) 2009,
Havana (Cuba) 2009,
Brussels European Film Festival (Belgium) 2010,
Cyprus film festival, 2010
Festival Internacional de Cine Invisible, Bilbao, 2010,
Panorama of European Films, Athens (Greece)2010,
Amsterdam Film Festival 2010,
International meeting of cinema, television, video and multimedia, Avanca (Portugal), 2010 – Grand Prix The best feature film and The Best cinematography
Trailer…Press reviews
“The Ambulance,” the first feature film by an outstanding documentary filmmaker, Goran Radovanovic, is a real art cinema film, or to put it more succinctly, this film is an “essay film” – a rare filmic device, not only in our cinema but also in the European cinematic framework.
This is a complex film of uncompromising directorial procedures that employ a multifaceted narrative told through a visual language depicting the omnipresent anxiety that encompasses Radovanovic’s characters and indeed the film as a whole. The film cunningly dissolves boundaries between the fiction and documentary and opens the space for symbolic, poetic, collective subconscious and oniric… “
“An Assay about Ordinary People” by Dubravka Lakic, Politika, November 2009
May you live in interesting times, says an old curse.
If we take a look at last two decades, it is not difficult to conclude that
these were extremely interesting times. The screenwriter and a film director, Goran Radovanovic, took a difficult task to talk about this turbulent period, following the idea that events should be considered and analyzed as they happen, while the wounds are still warm, not healed and painful. With intent to create a contemporary historical film, as he announces in the caption, Radovanovic combines documentary and feature, 35 mm and the most recent digital format, bitter and sweet, laughter and tears. And all this, without political extremism and by using a complex story based on a mosaic structure…
Djordje Bajic, Pop Box, December 2009
Similar to Makavjev’s WR, The Ambulance is an assemblage of the fictional and documentary material. Yet, whereas Makavejev uses an incongruency of the juxtaposed documentary and fictional material to create a bitter social comment or humor, Radovanovic often fuses visual documents and fictional segments. By using documentary material both to document the past and to comment on the fictional part, the film’s narrative system subverts the traditional story frame based on a linear time concept. In some sequences the director deliberately creates the confusion in the viewer by breaking the cause-effect order.
“The Ambulance, Black Wave Film and the Social Engagement, or It is Urgent, we Need “The Ambulance” By Dr. Nevena Stankovic, UBC, Canada
Press material