If the Serbian drama WHITE WHITE WORLD (BELI BELI SVET) deserves a subtitle it would be ‘The Great Depression’. Filmed mostly in a shaky hand camera perspective, the connected stories of several inhabitants of the Serbian mining town Bor are told. They drink, smoke and some, like teenage girl Rosa (Hana Selimovic), take other drugs. Her mother Ruzica (Jasna Duricic), who once had an affair with King (Uliks Fehmiu), murdered her husband after he found out. She is being released from prison, but before she returns, Rosa meets King and falls in love with him.

What sounds like a soap opera is not far from it, since the characters sing about their feelings in monologues, alongside some sad accordion music. Apart from these scenes, the film does not provide much text. The few actual dialogues are very brief and often followed by silent images while the protagonists tend to stare somewhere miserably. Everyone’s hobby seems to be to smoke a lot, drink excessively, beat each other up and occasionally copulate.

Apart from the absence of actual conversation, the film’s main problem seems to be the lack of explanation. The fact that the film is set in a mining town can only be understood by very few images, while the information that most of the miners are unemployed is completely missing. This would at least explain why everyone is so miserable. Instead, the film only causes two questions: What is everyone’s bloody problem and why is the film called WHITE WHITE WORLD?