O Gringo. A movie with Brazilian passion and Balkan soul.

Darko Baji`s documentary O Gringo was presented to the Greek audience during the 1st Week of Serbian Cinema in Athens. It was organized by the Greek Film Archives in collaboration with the Serbian Embassy in Athens.
Bajic΄s documentary focuses on the unique story of  the Serbian football player Dejan Petkovic, known with the nickname Rambo. Petkovic began his career in a small Serbian provincial club and managed to became the Number 10 of the legendary Brazilian club, Flamengo, in Rio de Janeiro.
Due to a sophisticated structure and hints by the script, the documentary succeeds  in presenting an amazing sport story, while it goes deeper into the human characters and reveals the passion of the aficionados.
Bajic started to work on this project many years ago. The idea was conceived in 2001 but they (Bajic and Petkovic) didn΄t start shooting until 2009, when the player`s career was approaching its end. 
“I did not like to present just a series of impressive images, but to search for the deeper meaning, the human soul behind them”, Mr. Bajic told us. “I needed many months of shooting,  many hours of films and more than 6 months of editing to achieve this goal. It was a great challenge to create a uniform film by so many different media: archives (in Film, Digital Beta and even VHS), shootings on Super 16mm, HD and many small camcorders. Darko Bajic remembers with great emotion that he took the most important images from the final game, where Flamengo won the championship, with a small camcorder by himself.
Another very important subject that the film deals with, is that of immigration.
“Our hero, Dejan Petkovic, is a Stranger for the Brazilian people - they call him Gringo. He lives  thousands of kilometers away from home, and is very nostalgic of his birth place. This is a universal feeling for all human beings, despite where they come from.”
This must see documentary is selected for the 14th Thessaloniki International Documentary Film Festival.