The Devil's Toy Redux Bor
2015 · 7m · Canada
Directed by Nikola Lezaic
Genres: coming-of-age, documentary
Tones: contemplative, tender
In the Serbian mining town of Bor, where industry is declining, the director befriends a small group of skaters reshaping life in his hometown.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
A doc about skaters in a Serbian rust belt town sounds like the most earnest coming-of-age premise imaginable—and then Lezaic commits to it so genuinely that the sincerity becomes almost transgressive, refusing the irony shield most filmmakers hide behind.
The film sits comfortably within the observational documentary tradition, tracing a lineage back to vérité's attention to youth culture and place, though its contemplative restraint marks it as contemporary—measured editing that knows when not to punctuate.
What arrests the whole thing is Lezaic's decision to shoot as an embedded participant rather than distant observer—the friendship *is* the film's architecture, and that choice turns a resource-thin setup into something that feels earned rather than extracted.