Belgrade 2.0

Frozen Knez Mihailova

Posted 2008-05-10 01:28 under Off The Record by Viktor Marković /

Nice chance to see a bit of Belgrade’s biggest and busiest pedestrian street on a sunny day: crew from NGO YIHR made an omage to a performance Frozen Grand Central made by a New York based group. This time with a slight political note – frozen Serbia after 11th of May – and as a part of a broader campaign, Vazni smo mi (“we matter”).

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Our man Niko

Posted 2008-05-08 05:02 under Off The Record by Viktor Marković / 5 comments

How much damage can a video game bring to a country’s already devastated image? We’ll just have to wait and see: new episode in a violent series GTA4 is out one week ago and it already seems according to both critics and fans that it will be one of the most talked about and most popular video games in history. So what’s it got to do with us over here at the peaceful little Balkans and our image?

Well, the main character, the guy you get to control – killer, thug, wifebeater, childhater, beerdrinker weapons and trafficking expert and drugdealer is – Serbian.

So much for our pitiful attempts to improve the dangeraously bad but still somewhat blurry picture foreigners have about Serbs – thanks to all the wars in the previous decade – all it takes is one fictional Niko Belic, Serbian veteran, from Bosnian war no less, to bring us back to the drawing board. This is not the first time Serbs have been depicted as bad guys – Hollywood movies have not been very kind to us, but most of them were flops that didn’t reach such a broad audience and didn’t leave such impact of the collective conciousness. With Grand Theft Auto IV – well I hope I’m wrong, but it seems to me that this one is going to stick around for a while.

Niko Belic, main character from the GTAIV series

If it is of any consolation, Niko (ironicly “niko” means “nobody” in Serbian) is not a common Serbian name, his Serbian accent sucks pretty bad and his “real” Serbian in the video game is pretty lousy. Also, despite being the bad guy, it’s the good bad guy – the one you want to be. So if you ever wanted to be a Serb for a while, now you can.

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