By drax on Skatehive
In 2011, during the census, many Croatian households dreaded the arrival of officials who would, under threat of heavy fines, extract from household members answers to questions of the most intimate nature and force them to think carefully while doing so, lest with “wrong” words in the eyes of fools – of whom there has never been a shortage in these unhappy part of the world – they bring upon themselves the stigma of being enemies of God, the nation, and the state. The dilemma of whether to say what is “proper” or what one truly feels, however, seems insignificant compared to the dilemma faced by the protagonists of the film Of Gods and Men, a French feature film crowned with Grand Prix at Cannes and other awards. The plot of the film, among other things, shows the consequences of the first attempt to implant the fragile plant of democracy onto the soil of North Africa, namely the multi-party elections in Algeria whose annulment in the early 1990s triggered a long and bloody civil war