Journalist, union activist and film director Aleksandar Petrovic (best known for the 1967 film I Even Met Happy Gypsies) was a central and dynamic figure in the Yugoslavian "New Film." Three is both more experimental and, some critics feel, more challenging than Gypsies. Its considerable visual lyricism is in the service of a stark neorealism, its journalistic immediacy a cover for piercing existentialism. A wartime triptych based on stories by Antonij Isakovic, the film presents three intimate encounters not so much with war as with its byproduct: death. More relevant to the moment, each sequence quickly and powerfully sketches the dehumanizing effects of war as the ultimate totalitarian experience. In the first, bewildered refugees at a provincial railway station anxiously sift rumor for news of Tito's Partisans. Into this heightened mood walks a traveller looking for his family; instantly made out to be a Fifth Column spy he is summarily dealt with. Wizened faces peering into the camera, a Gypsy with his dancing bear, the naivete of new recruits are images drained of humanity following this "first blood." The second episode boils down war to its essence: pursuit, and the rawness of imminent death. Two young Partisans are the specific quarry of German soldiers who track them, on land and by helicopter, through a forest into a barren, rocky scape and finally to the sea. The men would be like the sheep in this stunningly photographed landscape of absurdity (or like the "sheep" in the first episode) but for their persistent humanity. The third story, set in a village just after the war, tells of the difficult compromise with compassion faced by an officer whose final duty it is to weigh the fate of suspected collaborators and Royalist guerrillas.