The Trap

Srdan Golubović's The Trap (Serbian: Klopka) competed for the Golden Bear at the 57th Berlin International Film Festival in 2007 and won the FIPRESCI Prize at the goEast Festival of Central and Eastern European Film the same year. It was selected as Serbia's official submission for the 80th Academy Awards in the Best Foreign Language Film category and made the December 2007 shortlist of nine, although it did not advance to the final five.

The film is the second feature by Srdan Golubović — the Belgrade-based director who had previously made Absolute Hundred (2001) — and the project that established him as one of the central figures in post-Milošević Serbian cinema. The screenplay is by Golubović with Melina Pota Koljević and Srdjan Koljević, and is loosely adapted from a novel by the Serbian writer Nenad Teofilović.

The cast is led by Nebojša Glogovac, with Natasa Ninković, Anica Dobra and Miki Manojlović in major supporting roles; Glogovac — a celebrated Yugoslav theatre actor — would die unexpectedly in 2018 at fifty-five, with this role widely considered the apex of his screen work. Cinematography is by Aleksandar Ilić. Golubović would follow the film with Circles (2013), which premiered at Sundance, and Father (2020), which won the Silver Bear (Audience Award) at Berlin in the same year. The Trap remains the work most often cited in academic discussions of post-Yugoslav-wars Serbian moral cinema.