A Film a Week - We Shall Live Together / Živjećemo zajedno

 previously published on Cineuropa

The Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, especially its Bosnia and Herzegovina chapter, and the disintegration of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia left hundreds of thousands of people killed, wounded or forcefully displaced, and traumatised millions of them - so much so that it has remained, to this day, one of the main topics in public debate in all of the countries that resulted from the breakup of the socialist state. Croatian documentary filmmaker Damir Markovina certainly had a “front-row seat” to these events, which have been, along with his and his family’s ordeal during those years, a core interest in his work. In the medium-length film Wait for Me (2021), he approached the issue of his extended family’s forced mobility between five cities or villages, in three different countries. His follow-up offering, also a medium-length film, the Ji.hlava-winning title Deserters (2022), was centred on his and his former classmates’ experiences as exiles from their city, Mostar, during the 1990s wars.

In his feature-length debut, Markovina goes further and gets more personal, as the main protagonist is Damir’s politician father, Roko Markovina, with his different roles on the public scene and at home, as well his dilemmas, decisions and actions, all this before, during and after the war which had repercussions for the whole family. We Shall Live Together has premiered in the Documentary Competition of the Sarajevo Film Festival.

On the political front, Roko Markovina was a remarkable figure – a man who refused to betray his socialist ideals in the midst of nationalist hysteria, and who was ready to pay the price for it. On a personal level, however, he could easily be described as a stubborn, selfish idealist of a man whose fair, but rigid, moral principles and will to sacrifice the well-being of his family to defend them left many scars. The questions that Damir Markovina primarily addresses are Roko’s reasons for having his family evacuated from Mostar so late, too late, and his refusal to come back to live in “his” town after the war – while his younger son, the well-known left-leaning intellectual Dragan Markovina, went back and still lives there now. Both of the sons play the devil’s advocate, asking their father the questions which should theoretically help them clarify certain things and also get closure, whereas their mother, Zina, keeps suffering quietly, craving some sense of stability and predictability in her twilight years.

We Shall Live Together is a demanding film that asks the viewer to take in a wealth of both facts and emotions (spoken or unspoken) – indeed, those who have seen some of Damir Markovina’s previous works or know something about the recent history of Yugoslavia are definitely at an advantage. For those less familiar with the topic, Markovina provides enough contextual elements – via thoughtfully written on-screen intertitles – which feel unique and fit the general vibe of the film perfectly.

The same level of intricacy can be observed when it comes to the craftsmanship behind the film, which Markovina has lean a bit more towards experimental cinema than his previous ones – for instance, when he projects home movies onto the faces appearing in a still photo in the opening scene – while making sure he delivers a smooth blend, melding spontaneous newly filmed footage (shot by himself, Krešimir Štulina, and Tomislav Krnić) with intriguing archival images of the war and the Parliament. The striking sound design (courtesy of Miroslav Piškulić) must also be mentioned as one of the film’s highlights, and so must the editing, masterfully handled by Vladimir Gojun and Marta Bregeš.

In the end, We Shall Live Together is not just (and is not yet another) documentary about war, damaged family relations and the collapse of Yugoslavia told in the first person; it may very well be the ultimate film on all of these subjects.

A Film a Week - The Pavilion / Paviljon

 previously published on Cineuropa

Is revolution sometimes necessary, and, if so, when? With his first fiction film in over 20 years, Dino Mustafić (Remake, 2003) seems to be calling for one through the satirical story of some nursing home residents rebelling against the staff and the management who mistreat them. The Pavilion opened the 31st Sarajevo Film Festival.

Set in the aftermath of undisclosed violent events, the film opens with an interrogation of a wheelchair-bound elderly man nicknamed Schumacher (Zijah Sokolović) by a police inspector played by Alban Ukaj in a role not too dissimilar to the one he had in Full Moon. Insisting on telling the truth, rather than helping the investigation, Schumacher reveals the events that led to the tragedy.

The residents of the nursing home nicknamed The Pavilion have been abused by the staff for years – their heating would be turned off in the middle of winter, their pensions and possessions were taken, and they were denied hot water, food and even proper medical care. As the manager (Mirjana Karanović) puts it bluntly, the home constantly needs to cut costs – even basic care costs more than the patients can contribute. Sick and tired of being mistreated, the residents come up with a revolution led by Mojmir (Miralem Zupčević) in the political sense and Angelo (Rade Šerbedžija) in the combat sense.

They take up arms, overthrow the regime and take the staff members hostage. The mayor (Ermin Bravo) must find a solution as quickly as possible, since it is an election year and he has certain business interests in the nursing home. He opts for a peaceful solution while the SWAT team is getting ready to storm the building. Although the residents have most goals in common, which means new management and a dignified life worthy of a human being, the maximalist requests and take-no-prisoners tactics of their leadership pave the way to violence.

Working from a script by famous journalists Viktor Ivančić and Emir Imamović Pirke (based on Ivančić’s novella), Mustafić strives to examine the necessity of revolutionary takeover and change, for better or for worse, as the situation gets untenable. The filmmaker certainly has some interesting ideas, such as subverting the concept of the older generations’ guilt into the new generations abandoning the system of solidarity for selfish, profiteering reasons, but Mustafić somehow gets lost along the way in his attempt to strike a balance between the serious and the comic that at times does not shy away from low blows such as casual racism, gerontophobia and the abundant use of bodily functions for laughs. The use of the communist iconography seems downright naive.

On the technical side, the music by Bojan Zulfikarpašić always feels spot-on, while the camerawork by Almir Đikoli and Mustafa Mustafić is more often shaky, rather than feeling fluid, as intended. The editor Vladimir Gojun manages to save the day, just narrowly, by keeping the running time bearable and the pace high.

However, the trump card of the film should be its ensemble cast of regional thesps. Apart from those mentioned above, we also see Nikša Butijer, Jasna Diklić, Ksenija Pajić, Branka Petrić, Aleksandar Seksan and Meto Jovanovski in his last role. But with such a large number of characters that either function in a collective setting or just as plot devices, they usually do not have enough time or space to shine properly, so they also aim for scoring cheap points with gags and mannerisms. Nevertheless, they remain the strongest selling point of the film, especially in the region, since The Pavilion could hardly travel far.

A Film a Week - Gym

 previously published on Cineuropa

Some 20 years ago, it seemed like the cinema of Bosnia and Herzegovina was enjoying a boom, and Srđan Vuletić was one of the torchbearers after the success of his 2003 debut feature, Summer in the Golden Valley, which won the Tiger Award at IFFR the following year. Now, it has been 17 years since Vuletić’s second film, It’s Hard to Be Nice, and finally, we can see his third effort, Gym. The venue for the premieres of all three of Vuletić’s features has been the same: the Sarajevo Film Festival. This time, his movie is part of the Open Air programme.

Gym is a film with which its writer-director (working from a story by Mirela Tepanić-Grbešić) tries to explore the well-known, yet frustrating, situation in which a loud and aggressive minority manages to subdue the quiet majority. Vuletić attempts to do so by mixing the notions of situational comedy and social-realist drama with some twists and turns that veer towards a thriller, using one particular event as the stage for his intended metaphor.

The event in question is a banquet organised to celebrate the launch of a new telephone helpline aimed at solving ecological problems, and our point of view is that of the employees of the small firm in charge of the catering. Led by the boss, Damir, who is still torn between whether to close his firm owing to slow business or whether to keep on fighting in the hope of better times to come, the company is also the scene of a power struggle between the crazy, aggressive and offensive Ado (Dino Sarija), and his calmer and smarter brother-in-law, Riki (Edin Avdagić).

The source of the discord between them are their opposing attitudes towards their former colleague and the boss’s ex-girlfriend, Melisa (Dina Mušanović), who went on to found her own business. Ado’s plan is to beat Melisa into submission, quite literally, while Riki reasons that she had every right to try to strike it lucky on her own. The rest of the crew is rationally with Riki, but they are not willing to take a stand against the crazy Ado. And when the Chekhov’s gun appears by the end of the first act, we can be sure that it is going to go off by the end of the third.

Most of the problems with Gym stem from the notion that Vuletić has lost touch with the medium of cinema, since he spent a prolonged period teaching and working on TV-series projects. Although the initial situation and the basic characterisation are established pretty quickly, Vuletić takes his sweet time with the exposition and drags it out to the two-thirds mark of the film’s merciful 84-minute running time. In that regard, it seems like an extended pilot of a semi-ambitious TV show that tries to blend sitcom driven by local humour with social-realist and critical undertones concerning the hardships of young, working-class people in contemporary Bosnia.

The fact that it is pretty much set in a single location and has minimal production design also suggests a modest budget and/or production values, rather than some intended realism. The same could be said for Darko Herič’s cinematography, the digital crispness of which could serve better on smaller screens, rather than big ones, while Željko Šošić’s editing could have been smoother.

Gym is a stellar example of a piece of work whose noble intentions are hampered by bloated literary, didactic and preaching ambitions, compounded by a flawed, unspectacular execution. It’s a pity that even the central metaphor is relegated to the sidelines for such a long chunk of the running time.

A Film a Week - The Wrath of God / Božji gnjev

 previously published on Cineuropa

Kristijan Milić returns to the Pula Film Festival with one more genre piece, based on a novel by Josip Mlakić centred around the 1990s wars in the former Yugoslavia. The filmmaker once again blends different genres into a smooth and consistent amalgam with The Wrath of God, which has just premiered in the Croatian competition of the national festival. As a genre piece with universal appeal, one could expect specialised festivals to book the film in the future, but it could also fare reasonably well in the regional theatrical distribution landscape.

Central Bosnia, the winter of 1993. Ilija (Ivo Krešić, glimpsed in Milić’s previous feature, Dead Fish), formerly a maths teacher, is now a miner in the Croatian forces fighting against the Bosnian ones. His war routine is broken when he hears the news that his brother Goran was killed in action in a village several kilometres behind enemy lines, without his death having any strategic significance for the struggle. Furthermore, there is no official record of the action, and Goran and his comrades received a cash payment in US dollars for their involvement.

With the help of his contact in the intelligence department Zoran (Marko Cindrić, in his third collaboration with Milić), Ilija sets off on a mission to uncover who sent his brother and his comrades to death and what for. The conspiracy he discovers leads all the way to Zagreb and the shady deals between both sides of the conflict, with military and political officials involved. Ilija's investigation threatens to turn into revenge…

The war, or at least its echoes, serve as a primary topic in Milić's films, but the filmmaker's approach is always different in terms of genre. His debut The Living and the Dead (2007) blended WWII and the 1990s war in a mix of war movie, mystery, fantasy and supernatural horror. The subsequent Number 55 (2014) told the true story of the Croatian War for Independence as a pure high-octane war-action movie, while Dead Fish (2017) was an Altman-esque account of post-war human destinies in a divided city. This time, the foundation of the war movie is converted into a thriller with its sub-genres, such as the crime procedural, the film noir and the 1970s-style paranoid conspiracy thriller.

As a director, Milić makes all the calculated, smart moves to keep the plot going and intriguing for the viewers throughout the 110 minutes of its runtime. The pacing is usually moderate, which gives the sense that the plot breathes, while the shifts in genres are underlined by shifts of styles. For instance, the colour palette of Mirko Pivčević’s cinematography moves from the greys and browns of the war landscape to more bluish tones more suitable for an urban noir, and the music by Andrija Milić turns from old school orchestration with some acoustic guitar highlights, to something more jazzy and progressive as the plot moves to a different genre.

The same level of meticulousness can be observed in Milić’s choice of actors from the ranks of those he knows and has previously directed. Ivo Krešić as a leading man in a genre piece might have seemed a risky idea before, but the actor seizes the opportunity to prove himself capable of such an endeavour. He gets a lot of help from Marko Cindrić who plays Zoran in a very grounded fashion, Slaven Knezović (also the producer of the film) who plays Ilija's benevolent commander, while for Domagoj Mrkonjić in the role of Ilija's closest buddy could be a career-starting performance.

In the end, The Wrath of God is a slightly retro but never outdated, fulfilling genre movie experience. This kind of rock-solid but never flashy genre piece has become more and more of an oddity today.

A Film a Week - Die Before Death / Umri prije smrti

 previously published on Cineuropa

Sometimes the fact that a film is the product of domestic cinema and that it is envisioned in an audience-friendly manner is enough to secure it a world premiere in a popular sidebar of an international film festival. The track record of the filmmaker also helps: Ahmed Imamović’s Go West (2005) had a healthy dose of festival exposure back in the day, but nothing can hide the fact that Die Before Death seems like the odd one out on the programme of this year’s Sarajevo Film Festival, where it has been shown as an Open Air screening. Consolation for Imamović, his producers, and his cast and crew may come in the form of the fact that, with the national telecommunications operator and national radio and television station on board as co-production companies, its distribution (at least nationally) is secure.

The anti-hero of the film is Dr Zlatan Begović (Adnan Hasković, briefly glimpsed in small roles in Snowpiercer and Twice Born), a gynaecologist with a flexible moral compass when it comes to performing abortions. However, what defines him is his vanity, and his toxic and overblown self-love. His wife, Vesna (Mona Muratović), is sick and tired of their marriage, in which both of them are in love with one person – Zlatan himself. When he learns that he is in the terminal stages of cancer, he embarks on a physical, fantastical and metaphorical journey of self-searching in the company of some undertakers, the Churchill brothers (Milan Pavlović and Almir Kurt), as a passenger in their hearse. He visits a number of fantastic settings and receives various pieces of advice of a ritualistic, religious and philosophical nature, but perhaps the reason for this nightmarish journey of his lies in his past and in the relationship with his old flame Senka (Aida Bukva). Will he realise anything and change his ways accordingly before it is too late?

There is no modesty in terms of Imamović’s ambition with this one, starting with the four-chapter structure, each section equipped with a philosophical-sounding title (“Destiny”, “The Road” and so on) and bumper-sticker motto. But the story that he and his co-screenwriter Dragan Komadina tell simply does not live up to this ambition, eventually ending up in Hallmark Channel territory, dripping with sappiness and naivety. Most of the jokes in the film are played safe, for cheap giggles, although one particular vignette works in its sheer outlandishness, mostly thanks to the role of the boxing referee, played by the one and only Rade Šerbedžija in typical larger-than-life mode. Other actors’ hamming is simply not as efficient, but to their credit, their characters are written in a pretty one-dimensional way.

Imamović tries to compensate for the lack of a relatable story and characters with his music video-like directing style, bursting with heavily filtered colours and attempts at “money shots” of Bosnian locations, both urban and rural. The production and costume design, handled by Sead Gološ and Una Stjepić, respectively, aim for lavishness, but eventually hit mainly kitsch notes. Accompanied by the omnipresent and overloud soundtrack scored by Adnan Dado Mušanović and Ena Smajić, Die Before Death is often an exhausting, but rarely rewarding, viewing experience. It’s banal and naïve, rather than philosophical and life-like.

A Film a Week - Bosnian Pot / Bosanski lonac

 previously published on Cineuropa

Bosnian pot is the traditional dish of Bosnian miners, prepared in a particular fashion: everybody from the crew brings vegetables and, with any luck, meat from their homes, so they can cram everything into a single pot and cook it over a fire. Bosnian Pot, the newest film by Pavo Marinković, premiering in Sarajevo's Open Air sidebar, has little to do with cooking and the dish itself, but it uses its titular metaphor to tell a story about a peculiar refugee from the war in Bosnia who fell through the system in Austria, but who does everything in his power to stay in the country when his temporary residence permit is revoked. Given that the topic is close to the hearts of viewers in the region of the former Yugoslavia and the size of its diaspora in Central and Western Europe, some festival exposure and niche distribution should ensue.

Our protagonist Faruk (Senad Bašić) is a not-so-successful writer who is residing in Graz after fleeing the war in Sarajevo. He occasionally has some poetry recitals and the odd gig on local radio (the title comes from the topic of one essay that he wrote for it), and spends most of his free time in the “guest worker” circle centred on the restaurant owned by Stjepo (Goran Grgić), where his on-again-off-again lady friend Dragica (Bruna Bebić) works. Being far too intellectual for this working-class environment, he does not fit in very well with the rest of the crowd, but the fundamental difference between him and them lies somewhere else. While they have a foothold in both of their homelands, Faruk has one in none.

Trouble starts brewing when his residence permit gets revoked owing to the strict and complex Austrian administrative rules, so he needs proof that he is working and contributing to society in order to get a new one. To make matters worse, the radio is axeing his show, and his friend Sigi (Aleksandar Petrović) cannot protect him from this. But when Faruk meets one of Stjepo’s guests, Mujica (Admir Glamočak), who works as a janitor at the delapidated local theatre operated by actress-producer Therese (Brigit Stöger) and her unstable director fiancé Manni (Andreas Kiendl), he gets the idea to stage a play that he wrote before the war. Both sides would gain from the deal, so the actors get hired and rehearsals get under way, but can a “co-conspiracy” involving a failed artist and a failed theatre bear fruit?

Bosnian Pot is a very audience-friendly affair that touches on a number of subjects that are rarely spoken about, from the fact that the intellectuals among the refugees have more trouble fitting into a new society to the notion that some wars from the past, along with the refugees they have brought with them, fall out of the media spotlight whenever new ones rear their heads. Although it is by no means a spectacular affair, the movie benefits from its bulletproof concept of a hero’s journey to self-realisation and its clear four-act structure, as well as from its careful execution on a modest budget by all involved.

Senad Bašić plays sad sack Faruk sure-handedly, while the rest of the cast of Croatian, Bosnian and Austrian actors join in the interplay with him, and Marinković guides his ensemble through the right mix of heart-warming comedy and human drama. The cinematography by Peter Roehsler captures the sober reality of Graz and its outskirts, while the music, consisting of Ted Regklis' original score and some ex-Yugoslav hits, highlights the emotional landscape of the film. In the end, Bosnian Pot feels like eating warm comfort food.

A Film a Week - May Labour Day / Praznik rada

 previously published on Cineuropa

Back in the early 2000s, Pjer Žalica was probably the hottest and most bankable filmmaker from Bosnia and Herzegovina thanks to his first two features, Fuse (2003) and Days and Hours (2004). After this promising start, his career started to show signs of ups and downs, with some documentary passion projects, productions that fell through, an adaptation of a stage play into a script for Elmir Jukić’s film The Frog and a piece of filmed theatre, Focus, Grandma!, which opened the 2020 (pandemic) edition of the Sarajevo Film Festival. The festival still holds Žalica in high regard, placing the premiere of his newest effort, May Labour Day, in the closing-film slot, meaning that it played simultaneously in multiple open-air venues at Sarajevo.

The title comes from the International Workers’ Day holiday, the celebration of which was introduced in Yugoslavia in communist times. The tradition of celebrating the holiday in large groups with vast quantities of food has continued in all of the former federal republics, now independent states. And the ensemble of middle-aged and elderly friends at the centre of Žalica’s film is no exception to that rule.

However, the plans of Numo (Admir Glamočak), Mujke (Aleksandar Seksan), Žuna (Emir Hadžihafizbegović), Cijo (Ermin Bravo), their former neighbour Savo (Boris Isaković), now visiting from Canada, and to a lesser extent their wives are interrupted when their neighbour, friend and war comrade Fudo gets arrested by the special forces on war-crime charges. The situation gets even more complicated when Fudo’s unassuming son Armin (Muhamed Hadžović) comes for an unannounced visit, also bringing his pregnant wife, Diba (Labina Mitevska), insisting that he has to do his own investigation in order to clear his father’s name before it is too late. As the alcohol flows and the conversations get more and more heated, old wounds and resentment from the war in the early 1990s resurface, threatening to ruin not only the celebration, but also their friendship and communal spirit.

Žalica’s script falls into the trap of inflating the characters and the relations between them, which makes it more suitable for a stage play than for cinema, and his directing is not overly innovative either. The filmmaker makes good use of the slick cinematography by Almir Đikoli and the acting abilities of his cast of Bosnian and ex-Yugoslav A-listers, leaving them enough space for some theatrics and bravado without ruining the sense of continuity or realism in their performances, but he also uses clichéd tricks such as steering the viewers’ emotions through Dino Šukalo’s score. But the biggest issue is probably the fact that Žalica serves as his own editor, so any chance of cutting corners to make the film a bit leaner and more propulsive was sacrificed in order for the filmmaker to keep full control.

If Žalica’s only intention were to point out that this war from 30 years ago still dictates the lives of people in Bosnia and Herzegovina, one could call May Labour Day a success. The trouble is that Žalica does not bring anything particularly new to the table, since this is common knowledge both in the country and abroad. If it had come some 15 years earlier, the film would have been a good companion piece to the filmmaker’s early works, but nowadays, it seems fairly anachronistic, in terms of both its topic and its execution.

A Film a Week - Lights of Sarajevo / Svjetla Sarajeva

 previously published on Cineuropa

In the times of socialist Yugoslavia, Sarajevo had the informal status of, figuratively speaking, the scale model for the whole country, representing its diversities the most faithfully. This was the reason why pop-cultural products from Sarajevo, like movies filmed there and musical acts, could find their audiences all over Yugoslavia more easily than movies and bands from other cities and towns in the country. One of those legendary bands from Sarajevo is No Smoking (“Zabranjeno pušenje” in the original language), whose complicated history stretching over a 40 year period is the subject of Srđan Perkić’s documentary Lights of Sarajevo which just premiered in the documentary competition of the Sarajevo Film Festival.

Zabranjeno pušenje was formed by a group of Sarajevo teenagers as a punkish, subversive band in the late '70s and achieved first local and then nationwide fame in the '80s, releasing four albums and playing big gigs all over Yugoslavia. However, in 1990, the band's founding members and leaders Nele Karajlić and Sejo Sexon decided to split up over creative differences. After the war in Yugoslavia, two separate bands were formed under the same name, one based in Belgrade, the other in Sarajevo, both claiming rights to the original band’s heritage, while developing their careers in separate directions. Karajlić’s branch later became the No Smoking Orchestra, known for performing music in numerous Emir Kusturica films. Sexon’s branch of the band and Sexon himself (actually, the person behind the nickname, Davor Sučić) are in the centre of Perkić’s documentary, serving as its co-screenwriter and narrator, therefore providing the singular point of view that is still respectful to the other branch of the former band.

But Lights of Sarajevo is not just a story about the band, but also about the city, its unique way of life through different times (there is a sense of relief that the war is rarely mentioned and does not serve as the topic of the film), and especially one of its cult places, the Skenderija sports hall. The band’s last concert in it in 2019 serves as the film's framework, both narrative and musical, since the numbers played at the concert are abundantly re-used for the documentary’s soundscape. However, the juicier parts of the films consist of Sexon’s anecdotes both from the past and the present and his musings about the music, the touring, the status of the band that is cult on one level, but also down to earth and folksy on another.

Aware that he is making a music documentary, Perkić combines the archival and the newly filmed material, playing the band members and the things they contribute to their strengths. Sexon is a talkative and interesting narrator, providing intriguing information in a casual way. The band’s guitarist Toni Lović serves also as the film’s sound designer. Perkić infuses the film with some music video aesthetics as well, using short takes from multiple cinematographers and Tomislav Josipović’s sharp, rapid editing, even multiple projections, for seemingly no reason other than to show off.

Eventually, Lights of Sarajevo would serve as a very decent anthology of the band’s work and working conditions for existing fans, and as an introduction to it for new ones. Its sheer topic would be sufficient to get an audience in the region and among the Yugoslav diaspora and to secure bookings in regional festivals specialised in music documentaries, while its 68-minute format can make it suitable for television distribution.

A Film a Week - A Perfect Love Story Where Nothing Goes Wrong or Does It...?

 previously published on Cineuropa

The lengthy title of Emina Kujundžić’s directorial debut, A Perfect Love Story Where Nothing Goes Wrong or Does It..?, pretty much sums up the whole film. It seems like the director wanted to give her own personal insights on the topic of love outside of the romantic preconceptions prevalent in the modern, interconnected world. The movie premiered at the Sarajevo Film Festival earlier this year and is currently playing as a special screening in the Festivals in the Spotlight section of the Zagreb Film Festival.

Kujundžić, however, opens her film on a slightly “meta” level: a female filmmaker played by Sadžida Tulić is at a meeting with an important producer (Srđan Vuletić), and she films him giving her feedback on her script. In a slightly misogynistic manner, he calls it too short and caught up in typical “feminine details”, like the colours of clothes, furniture and props, while lacking any real substance or information on who and what the characters in the film really are. Bearing in mind that Kujundžić’s previous credits included production design and costume design activities, this character might as well be a stand-in for her. In the following scene, she complains about it to her “partner in crime” (Luka Marjanović), who takes the producer’s side somewhat, since he does not know much about the film project.

The rest of Kujundžić’s movie is pretty much the film that the director tries to make. A nameless Sarajevo urbanite (Enisa Njemčević) lives with her French boyfriend (Victor Bessière) in a seemingly harmonious relationship. In the middle of the night, they wake up, load up their car and embark on a road trip through Herzegovina, towards the sea. There is a lot of chatter on the radio station that they are listening to, about an audacious bank heist that they may or may not have anything to do with. One thing is certain: they have a huge stash of money. But this is not a ride into the sunset, because our two leads grow further and further apart owing to the differences in their characters and attitudes: while his wishes are simple, hers are ambitious and sometimes radical.

Halfway through, Kujundžić goes back to the meta level by introducing two foreign, diva-like female producers (Lana Ball and Emma Jaay), who are more interested in their thoughts on the topic of who is watching whom in the film world than in the actual filmmaking process. This is clearly a comment, as are the manic jump cuts in the scenes that the directress shares with her partner and the fact that, as the “plot” of the film unfolds, both lead and supporting characters start speaking their own languages, and everybody understands each other. Eventually, A Perfect Love Story Where Nothing Goes Wrong or Does It..? is not so much about love as it is about sincere filmmaking and the impossibilities of both in a world that is cynical to its core.

However, that world is not completely devoid of beauty, at least superficially, as shown in the cinematography by Almir Đikoli, which highlights the small wonders of life in a natural way, and in the inspired, eclectic soundtrack by Sloven Anzulović. The cast of lesser-known actors, mostly non-professionals, also fits the bill perfectly, making this a sincere filmmaking experiment, rather than a story (love or otherwise) actually being told.

A Perfect Love Story Where Nothing Goes Wrong or Does It..? is a completely crowd-funded, micro-budget film financed through an Indiegogo campaign, with donations from private sources in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatia. There was no production company involved, and the cast and crew worked on it for free.

A Film a Week - Disturbed Earth

 previously published on Cineuropa

Wars destroy countries, communities and individual lives, even for those who physically survive. The war in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the 90s still has repercussions today. It is still a heavy topic, especially around important dates such as 11 July, the date of the Srebrenica genocide, but the narrative in the mainstream media on every side almost exclusively revolves around nations, ethnic or religious groups, and rarely around individuals and their destinies.

That is not the case in Disturbed Earth by Kumjana Novakova and Guillermo Carreras-Candi, one of the films having its world premiere in the Sarajevo Film Festival’s Documentary Competition. As stated on the introductory title card, collective pain is made of personal losses and sorrows. Given the significance of its topic and the freshness of its style, the film does not have any trouble communicating with international audiences, and further festival exposure is to be expected.

The film begins with a brief introduction shot at the 20^th anniversary of the genocide (in 2015). We follow a truck decorated with a flag and flowers, carrying coffins which contain recently exhumed earthly remains of people killed 20 years ago, before witnessing the encounter between the vehicle and the families of the killed and the proper burial of the remains, seeking to secure eternal peace for the dead. The filmmaking duo then shifts its focus towards three survivors, whose difficult daily lives are marked by the sadness caused by loss and hard labour. Srećko is a man who came back to live off the woods around his house, on a hill just above Srebrenica. During the war, he was conscripted into the army of Republika Srpska and therefore forced to facilitate the war crimes against his neighbours. Mirza survived Srebrenica by hiking across the mountains for days to Tuzla. He is now back to his old house together with his wife to live off the land, since there are no jobs. Mejra lost her husband and sons, she is now 85 years old and still lives off the land.

The observations of their routines are intercut with archival material from the time of the war crimes and shortly afterwards, some of it notorious and some not known at all, as well as by title cards of two types. Some of them, written by Kumjana Novakova, serve as a poetic narration of sorts, and the tone of the cards is lyrical, even elegiac. The second group of cards is more matter-of-fact, since its authors are the protagonists themselves, sharing their observations, thoughts and memories about death and life.

Emotions are concentrated in a very compact runtime of just over 70 minutes, but Disturbed Earth does not feel rushed at all. It is in fact meditative, thanks in part to the combination of analogue and digital cinematography by Novakova and Carreras-Candi and the hypnotic editing by Jelena Maksimović. The choice of archival material is loaded with symbolism, while the finely-tuned sound design by Oriol Gallart Miret and his scarce employment of eerie music at just the right moments adds up to the atmosphere of general unpleasantness and sadness. Disturbed Earth transposes its viewer to a specific state of mind and emotion necessary to understand and feel individual tragedies and collective pain.