After my last film "Pretty Village, Pretty Flame," a tragi-comedy about the war in Bosnia, I had vowed never to do a war film again. I said what I wished to about that senseless 5 year long war, and I tried to express the views of my generation about the destruction of the country that we had lived in, and the future that we have been robbed of. Anyhow, after unexpectedly hearing a true story about two under-aged criminals, and after living in a country during the five years in which all I had ever believed in had turned into radioactive waste, I decided to write another war story.

This is a story about a different kind of war - a war that has taken place during the five year period far away from the front lines, but that had left far worse consequences than plain physical destruction. This is about internal destruction, the breakdown of the moral value system, the destruction of ethics, the vanishing of all faith in the future. I realized that the generation I belong to, the generation of urban people from Belgrade and Serbia has not gone through the worst during these last five years. many of us have had the chance to emigrate or find comfort in the hope that better times and a better life await us. But the young growing up in the wave of primitivism and nationalism flooding Serbia, those who went through puberty while Vukovar and Sarajevo were being destroyed, who have totally lost faith in their elders, these young people are the terrible victims of this war and their wounds will never heal.

This is a story about young criminals whom I believe have a deep moral right to be violent, even to murder, despite the political unacceptability of this idea. An insensitive society and a totalitarian Serbian regime have made thousands of Serbian teenagers dangerous, senseless killing machines, ironically whose main victims are themselves.

Once during an interview on Belgrade TV, I was asked whether I condemn the young Serb generation for its lack of morality and the increase in crime among young people. I answered that I cannot condemn these kids, quite the contrary, I said that it is quite all right for them to rob and steal and they should bust into the houses of those businessmen, politicians and ministers that have become rich during the war, because they have heir sneakers, their first trips abroad, summer vacations that these kids never had, nor will ever have.

Because of this statement I have been attacked in the media, but the controversy it has created convinces me that I am on the right path as far as this project is concerned. This will be a very cruel and shocking film, a film that will make "A Clockwork Orange" seem like a Disney production. Unfortunately this is a true look at Belgrade and Serbia, and I do not see the pont in changing it.

The title "The Wounds" is more than symbolic. The wounds in the flesh of our main characters are also festering wounds on a body of one horrible regime under which we are forced to live these last seven years.

-Srdjan Dragojevic