A Film a Week - The House in Kraljevec / Kuća na Kraljevcu

 previously published on Cineuropa

There is a house in the Zagreb suburb of Kraljevec. One can reach it by taking a road out from the town centre, going uphill, crossing a park that turns into dense forest and climbing the stairs. It looks like many other houses in the area, but something in particular makes it quite special. For Croatian cultural journalist, writer, screenwriter and, recently, documentarian Pero Kvesić, it is certainly a unique place. Not just for the reason that it is his house, but also for its history, which Kvesić was a part of. The House in Kraljevec has premiered in the Balkan Dox competition of Dokufest, but its topic could make it very interesting for further festival exposure in the region of the former Yugoslavia.

The topic is not the house itself, but rather its inhabitants. In Yugoslav times, the middle floor was occupied by journalist and writer Goran Babić and his family: wife Kaća, son Nikola and daughter Nataša. The bottom floor was rented out by the house’s owner, so the occupants often fluctuated. Most of them came from artistic circles, so the abode served as a cultural hub in the 1970s and 1980s. The list includes names like writer and musician Davor Slamnig, singer Davor Gobac, photographer Goran Pavelić Pipo, comic-book artist Igor Kordej, actor Vilim Matula, animator-novelist-filmmaker Milan Trenc, and world-famous graphic designer Mirko Ilić, who all lived there, crashed there or at least went there to party.

But the most peculiar of all of the house’s tenants is its owner, the occupant of the top floor and the man who built it himself – Slobodan Praljak. Before the war in Yugoslavia, he was a highly respected theatre, film and television director, a well-educated man with three university degrees and, as legend has it, the person responsible for Abdulah Sidran (famous for Emir Kusturica’s first two films) finishing his first two movie scripts. But, when the war started, he joined the cause with the Croatian forces in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and went down in history as a convicted war criminal who committed suicide by poisoning himself in front of the cameras upon hearing his sentence handed down by the International Crime Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY).

Starting in a light-hearted manner with some reminiscing about the “happy times” and “glory days” through interviews with the occupants of the lower floor, the tone gradually turns darker. However, the focus of it is not Praljak’s fall from grace owing to his engagement with the war, but more of a moral one, considering his relations with the Babić family. The families shared some history in their native Herzegovina before Goran and Slobodan came to Zagreb, but various personal matters and political differences put a serious spanner in the works.

For Kvesić as a documentarian, it is always more about the story than it is about stylistic showiness. Here, he also plays it safe, betting all his chips on sincerity, rather than trying to play any flashy tricks, similarly to his previous autobiographical documentary, Dum spiro spero (2016). This notion might also stem from the fact that, owing to Kvesić’s illness, the film was finished by editor and co-writer Vesna Biljan Pušić and producer Nenad Puhovski, who respect Kvesić enough not to intervene too much. However, Kvesić and his spirit are present throughout the picture, in his narrations and in the friendly interviews in which the filmmaker does not shy away from stepping in front of the camera. This means The House of Kraljevec remains very much his film and a story that only he could tell.