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 Serbia's official submission for Best Foreign Language Film at the 80th Academy Awards and made the December 2007 shortlist of nine, though it did not advance to the final five.

It is the second feature by Srdan Golubović, a Belgrade-based director whose debut was Absolute Hundred (2001), and the project that established him as one of the central figures in post-Milošević Serbian cinema. Golubović wrote the screenplay with Melina Pota Koljević and Srdjan Koljević, loosely adapting a novel by the Serbian writer Nenad Teofilović.

Nebojša Glogovac leads the cast, with Natasa Ninković, Anica Dobra and Miki Manojlović in major supporting roles. Glogovac, a celebrated Yugoslav theatre actor, died unexpectedly in 2018 at fifty-five, and for us this role is the peak of everything he did on screen. Cinematography is by Aleksandar Ilić. Golubović followed 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 is still the work that academic writing on Serbian moral cinema after the Yugoslav wars returns to most often.