Seven thousand years ago, Vinča, a suburb of the ever-expanding Belgrade on the Danube, was the cradle of European Neolithic culture, explains a narrative title overlaid on a panning shot of artefacts and bones that seamlessly fades into the post-apocalyptic images of one of Europe's largest unsanitary landfills, located just a few kilometres away from the archaeological site. This is the opening of Bottlemen [+lee también:
tráiler
entrevista: Nemanja Vojinović
ficha de la película], the new feature-length documentary by Serbian director Nemanja Vojinović, which has just world-premiered at Sarajevo.

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The dump is enveloped in smoke as a group of firefighters tries to put out yet another blaze, a source of contamination that, in the last five years, has regularly ranked Belgrade among the most heavily polluted cities in the world. As DoP Igor Marović's camera pulls back to a percussion-heavy, dramatic score by Predrag Adamović, the size of the landfill and the thickness of the smoke make it look like a smouldering volcano. Another swirling cloud is formed by thousands of foraging, screeching seagulls. This is the workplace of our protagonist, Roma man Yani, and his team of titular men who make a living by collecting plastic bottles and aluminium foil, competing with other groups who have no qualms about stealing each other's large sacks filled with this loot.

Yani is his team's leader and is constantly under pressure from an unseen boss – we only hear his voice over the phone. After all, this is a black-market activity, and no laws or regulations apply. Yani and his men rush over as soon as a garbage truck arrives with a new load. Our hero, a former boxer, struggles to keep them in line. These are poorly paid men who have never had a chance at proper employment in yet another Eastern European country where Roma people are marginalised and devoid of opportunities, and often, they would rather drink booze or smoke weed than bother to come to work.

Split into three chapters of roughly equal length, and interspersed with deadpan quotes from the protagonists, such as “Being a group leader is like driving a VW Golf 3. It's a fast ride, but it costs a lot,” the film follows Yani as he falls out of favour with the boss and gets suspended, so new group leaders replace him. A timid man by nature, he is frustrated and embittered by what he perceives as an injustice, which prevents him from earning enough to finish the house he is building for his family in his home Roma settlement by the town of Novi Bečej, 150 km north of Vinča.

Throughout the film, radio news bulletins inform us of the pollution, and then of the government's plans to create a proper waste management facility with investments from France and Japan, which means Yani and the other men will be unable to earn even this meagre income. Vojinović has clearly earned their trust through the years of making the film, so we are close to them even as they get high and play "spin the bottle" in a squalid room. But this is not misery porn: the director makes sure we meet and understand them, even if we can't completely grasp the dynamics of the power games in this strictly observational film.

The environmental component of the documentary is its overarching theme, inevitably grabbing our attention with striking visuals in Marović's high-contrast cinematography. Vojinović manages to extract a rather visceral, raw poetry from this ugly but epic environment, mostly thanks to the closeness to the characters, but the class/racial issue is very present, too. All of these elements are enviably well balanced, and tell an engaging and thought-provoking story.

Bottlemen is a co-production between Serbia's Rt dobre nade and Set Sail Film, and Slovenia's URGH! Taskovski Films has the international rights.