Summaries

Synopsis

Ginger: More than a Game is a story about Radivoj Kora, one time the best basketball player in the world and a member of FIBA Hall of Fame in Madrid, top scorer of the 1960 Rome Olympic Games, Olympic Silver medalist in Mexico 1968, two times Silver medalist in World Championships, and the man after whom one European club competition was named.But he was so much more than that.Radivoj Kora revolutionized not only Serbian and Yugoslav basketball, but also popular culture in his homeland. He was the first real pop-star in socialist Yugoslavia, a phenomenon that Yugoslav society never experienced before.He was a man of renaissance curiosity, capable of uniting complete opposites. He was the best basketball player in the world and at the same time the best student of Belgrade Faculty of Electrical Engineering, equally comfortable in company of street-wise rascals and Nobel prize-winning writer Ivo Andri. He was one of the most important promoters of Western culture in a country locked behind the Iron Curtain and the man who brought the first record of The Beatles to Belgrade, but he could get away with it because even communist dictator Josip Broz Tito realized the importance of Radivoj Kora for the international image of Yugoslavia. And thanks to this, the sport received a strong government support for decades.Aleksandar orevi and Milenko Tepi, Kora's heirs in Serbian basketball, guide us through his life story. In many ways, his biography is at the same time digested history of Yugoslavia and his troubles oddly correspond with Yugoslavia's attempts to overcome devastating consequences of the war and develop into a modern state. Practically everything that happened to his country left a strong mark on Radivoj Kora's life: from the Second World War, when his family twice avoided execution by pure luck, his father's post-war imprisonment in the notorious gulag of Goli Otok, to Yugoslavia's U-turn towards the West and rise of consumerism in the swinging Belgrade of the sixties, when he became a celebrity and an icon of style. Even his tragic, James Dean-esque end in a car crash became a powerful metaphor, as he was on his way to a premiere in Belgrade's Atelje 212 theater. The play he was going to see was the Yugoslav production of HAIR, musical that symbolizes '60s counter-culture and a new breath of freedom.In our film, his mother and his brother, his friends and contemporaries, his team-mates as well as his rivals, all give a precise account of his outstanding life, his majestic sport career and his unique character. Our impressive list of interviewees includes legends of Yugoslav basketball like Borislav Stankovic, Ranko Zeravica, Ivo Daneu, Vladimir Cvetkovic, Josip Djerdja, Nemanja Djuric, Nikola Plecas, his teammates from Petrarca Padua, Francesco Varotto, Giuzeppe Stefanelli, his rivals from Spain Pedro Ferrandiz, Clifford Luyk, Emiliano Rodriguez, and many others.The fiction part of the movie consists of re-enactments of important events from his life and époque, from forties to the end of sixties of 20th century, including scenes from his childhood and WW2, his first basketball steps, his encounters with Ivo Andri and Tito, public life of former Yugoslavia in these days...His life made him a star. His death made him a legend.