A good or at least useful definition of what cinema is is perhaps one of the simplest: one among many ways, albeit more complex, of narrating, of show up, a story. A mere format or technique. A mold. Which also doesn't help much in the attempt to refer less to its dynamics than to its content; moreover, these ways, as well as the stories themselves, can be as multiple and diverse as the moment they are told, the intentions of those who tell them and the perspectives of those who watch them.The Diary of a Machinist(Serbia/Croatia, 2016), makes this notion even more palpable, that cinema can be many things, however much its mold has been wasted, less something amenable to a univocal concept.
    Written and directed by Milos Radovic, its theme is based on a funereal statistic, the number of fatal victims from train collisions in the interior of Serbia. Hence, for the personal testimony of one of these old machinists, Ilyá (Lazar Ristovski), the inculpability that however fatalizes him and whose hard eyes behind the silent austerity set the tone of a good part of the narrative. He is joined by an orphan who sees the cure for his disappointments in the ungrateful job of a machinist. Thus, constricted, the plot is confined to dismantled wagons, tracks and stations in the middle of nowhere, but this modesty is one of the elements that give theThe Diary of a Machinistits surprising ability to show a subtle side of fatality but also its counterparts.