GOODBYE, 20TH CENTURY!

In a post-apocalyptic Macedonia, a nomadic tribe sentences a man to death, blaming him for the deaths of its children. When their bullets fail to kill him, they abandon him in the wasteland, cursed with immortality. His search for a way to die leads him to a barber-prophet, who sends him after a green-haired guardian and a wall on which humanity’s fate is written. From this ruined future, GOODBYE, 20TH CENTURY! jumps backward through a disastrous wedding captured on silent film to the last New Year’s Eve of the old century. There, a man dressed as Santa Claus comes home to find his neighbors holding a wake—and the gathering spirals toward the violence that will bring their world to an end.

Macedonian filmmakers Darko Mitrevski and Aleksandar Popovski pour their millennial disgust into a science-fiction nightmare with the sacrilegious imagination of an underground comic. The camera plunges down a toilet and emerges in outer space; biblical prophecy shares the screen with extravagant splatter. Beneath the delirium is a viciously funny certainy that humanity will carry its appetite for punishment into any future it manages to survive. The film’s farewell to a century of slaughter is delivered with all the decorum it deserves: Sid Vicious singing “My Way,” and Santa Claus opening fire on a roomful of mourners.