67 Days

Given that the socialist-realism school of Eastern European film-making - 'the aesthetic of the short-sighted camera' - tends to concentrate on historical reconstructions for home-market consumption/inspiration, it is surprising to find this turning up in London (even cut to 118 minutes). It's perhaps not so surprising that the film itself is a truly dire partisan epic, of minor interest only as a didactic lesson on the 'Uzice Republic', which survived as a springboard for Yugoslav communist resistance for a couple of months in 1941, in the face of a combined assault by the Germans and royalist Chetniks. A predictable script outlines the fate of a workers' battalion led by a Tito surrogate (while the great man himself is portrayed in mock actuality footage), and runs its tedious course through a series of logistically-confusing battle scenes and a few sentimental vignettes.