If in the film the mysterious psychiatrist and obsessive art collector Ruben Brandt is on the hunt for thirteen famous paintings, then there are infinitely more references and inspirations than Milorad Krstić collects in his debut feature film (and the first Hungarian film in Piazza Grande in the history of Locarno), in a bulimic and highly cultured figurative turn-around that uses the most advanced digital drawing and modelling techniques to link animated cinema to its noble roots in the history of art and painting, from Botticelli to Hopper. But if artistic biographies and documentaries of painters and museums are increasingly common and appreciated at festivals and in cinemas, the experience proposed by Ruben Brandt, Collector is completely different and original: a total immersion in a stratified visual imagery that feeds on painting, design, architecture, literature, graphics and contemporary history, and has for theater the most famous museums in the world such as the Louvre, Orsay, Tate, Uffizi, Hermitage and MoMA, but surprisingly chooses the rhythms of the most exciting action thriller and, if that wasn't enough, with memorable sequences involving cinematic imagery, from pre-cinema to Tarantino. In short, a twin spirit between genre cinema and refined quotationist collage, coherently with the double theme that runs through the whole film; from the initial quotation by the Hungarian writer Frigyes Karinthy to the recurring Double Elvis by Warhol, the painting that will complete Brandt's collection. Krstić, born in Slovenia but who has lived in Budapest since 1989, is not only a director (with the animated short My Baby Left Me which won the Golden Bear in Berlin in 1995) but also a painter, illustrator and sculptor, and transforms every scene, shot, and even frame into an imaginative programming of clues and references: it is mandatory to stay until the very detailed closing credits to find out how many of them you have captured!
