Serbian director Danilo Bećković and screenwriter Dimitrije Vojnov certainly know what they're doing. With their previous films Little Buddho and The Samurai in Autumn [+leggi anche:
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scheda film], they easily proved to regional audiences that they can trust them with quality entertainment. Now, joining forces with co-director Andrijana Stojković for their new outing, 3211, they have done it again. After four weeks on release in Serbia and Montenegro (through distributor Taramount Film), and three in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the film has sold a total of 50,000 admissions. But there is a catch: it is a hybrid music documentary.

However, if the genre isn't an obvious draw, the protagonist is. Stefan Djurić Rasta is one of the most popular trap performers in the region, and the film tells his story through a fluid combination of dramatised sequences revolving around his stretch in prison, musical segments, of which many can stand alone (and will probably be used) as music videos, and talking-head interviews, which Stojković was in charge of.

Rasta was born in Priština in 1989 and, during the NATO bombing ten years later, followed his family to Srebrenica before ending up in Belgrade. The intro animation gives us this information, barely skimming the surface of the historical events of those years, but there is really no need to go into them – regional audiences are certainly well-acquainted with them. There is an overlap between Serbia's violent past (and present) and the milieu that Rasta's music and image have grown out of, but demanding 3211 to comment on it would be like asking it to be another film.

Instead, the focus is firmly on the star, and in the interviews, he does talk about the circumstances in which he grew up and later developed as an artist. He definitely possesses a rough charisma and is quite articulate: after all, he writes music and lyrics and produces, despite never having finished any school he went to, including the one devoted to music.

The film opens with one of the dramatised scenes, as police are planning to bust him. Everybody knows he smokes weed, as it's part of his image, but he is hardly an Escobar. So the opening, which feels like something out of Denis Villeneuve's Sicario, seems at least partly played tongue-in-cheek, with Vojnov's dialogue poking fun at law enforcement – their idea of street lingo is about 20 years old, unlike what we hear from Rasta or other inmates in his cell, where he quickly builds up cred and even gets "promoted" to a leader by the warden, played by Radoslav Milenković, an actor whom audiences will immediately recognise as such a character, owing to the many similar roles he has played.

The visual style of the constantly panning, tracking and dollying camera, combined with the frequent use of slow motion, also fits with gangsta-style music videos, which fused into the trap genre as much as they did into turbo-folk decades earlier. But since many of these scenes take place inside the prison, and are set to the songs he wrote inside, the vibe is different: there’s no oversexualised twerking, coke snorting or flashy cars zooming by – even the fact that Rasta drives a BMW is used as a recurring joke.

Visually, the emotional elements focus on Rasta's relationship with his daughter, with a simple and elegant solution in the most successful of the music video-like segments. In the interviews, he speaks more about it, and these are, in a justified contrast, executed in a straightforward manner, with one static camera and the protagonist sitting in an armchair against a black background, dressed in a simple black sweater.

Even for those of us who are not into this kind of music and imagery, and all their accompanying social and political baggage, it is a fact that Rasta is a cultural phenomenon, of which the film serves as a creative document.

3211 is a production by Belgrade-based Balkaton.