A Film a Week - All Operators Are Currently Unavailable / Svi operateri su trenutno zauzeti

 previously published on Cineuropa

Back in 2021, Dalibor Barić, a Croatian filmmaker, and specialised graphic novelist and animator, was shortlisted for the Academy Awards for his feature-length debut, Accidental Luxuriance of the Translucent Watery Rebus (2020). That success, if not the previous acclaim on the festival circuit, with stops at Annecy and IFFR, drew the attention of the cinemagoing public to the auteur, who had until then preferred to stay out of the spotlight. Now, he is back with his second feature, All Operators Are Currently Unavailable, which has just premiered at the Pula Film Festival. Further exposure through the niche world of animation for adult audiences should follow.

The story follows a washed-up screenwriter called Roman Novotny (voiced by Nikša Marinović), who missed his chance at fame and glory owing to his uncompromising and mischievous attitude. Through his agent, he gets an offer he cannot refuse, although it is far from being his cup of tea. He gets a gig to write stories for clients vacationing at a mysterious, far-away Simula Peninsula resort operated by the visionary, unpredictable and slightly dictatorial scientist Dr Doppler (Boris Bakal).

The rules of the game seem simple, although it is never clear how it would work in a social situation. Everyone there should be treated as the hero of their own story, with the rest relegated to supporting characters or even extras who cannot interfere with other people’s stories. Although Roman can count on some help from his former collaborator Albert (Nikša Butijer), the task of finding a solution for Klara (Ana Vilenica), her fiancé (Frano Mašković) and the mysterious, blank entity of Persona might prove too hard for him. Once he is forced to fulfil a double role, that of a screenwriter and that of a character who has to substitute for the fiancé, his mind and his grip on reality, no matter how strange it might be, begin to fall apart.

Once again, Barić demonstrates his knack for defying the categorisation of film with his work, which brings animation and experimental cinema together in non-linear stories based on genre tropes from movies, literature and comic books. All Operators Are Currently Unavailable might be his most accessible work to date, but it is still obvious that it is far less about a narrative that can be followed and “understood” completely, and more about an unpleasant atmosphere (here verging on the body of work of the late David Lynch), the philosophical questions that viewers may ask along with the characters they are observing, and the artisan approach that Barić opts for.

For the first time, the filmmaker has worked with the freeware Blender program, which is not actually made primarily for animated cinema, but rather for retro-style, even simplistic video games. Nevertheless, it does a good job of integrating the hand-drawn characters and backgrounds, even when the simulation of the camera movements is added in. At times, it might not seem as smooth as desired, but that unfinished and “glitchy” feeling suits the material, and even seems like a perfect match and conscious choice.

Barić served as the writer, director and animator here, effectively handling the entire visual aspect, but also worked as his own editor. An extra hand in the editing room would have been useful to trim some of the running time because almost two hours of mind-bending action might seem too demanding for some. In the end, All Operators Are Currently Unavailable serves as a wild thrill ride of a film that can also be taken as a meditation on creation, destruction and re-creation.

A Film a Week - South Wind / Južina

 previously published on Cineuropa

In Dalmatia, especially in the winter time, one’s moods, feelings and therefore actions are controlled by the winds. The bura, or internationally "bora", usually brings dry air and clarity, but also the cold. On the other hand, the jugo (or more commonly "sirocco") brings warmth, but also humidity, rain and a chance of unexpected, erratic behaviour by some people. Effectively, in the everyday mythology of the Croatian Adriatic, the jugo and the weather it brings, južina, play the role usually reserved for the full moon in other parts of the world. This kind of weather serves as the starting point and the mood board for Marin Ante’s exceptionally ambitious and deftly crafted feature debut South Wind, which has opened the 72nd Pula Film Festival.

The story is set in and around a four-storey, eight-apartment building in the city of Split, during one day of južina weather. It opens with a sequence outside where two thugs (Franko Jakovčević and Đorđe Marković) wait for the signal from a third person to start an action aimed against somebody. Most of the rest of the film plays through a flashback in which we get to know the building's tenants, and which sets up a mystery around which one of them got onto the thugs’ radar.

In one flat on the first floor, history teacher Toma (Donat Zeko) has moved back in with his father, an avid Venezia FC fan called Mićo (Stojan Matavulj) after earning a suspension from work for pushing the Ancient Roman narrative regarding Christianity. In another, Anka (Snježana Sinovčić Šiškov) asks tough guy Stipe (Mijo Kevo) to do something about the hooligan brothers on the top floor. On the next two floors, two apartments are for short-term rent, while the other two are occupied by one family each. The religious Dumanić family has to face their daughter’s (Petra Krolo) teenage rebellion, while the other family uses their daughter’s birthday for the father (Paško Vukasović) to pitch his rhymes to a famous rapper (Grgo Šipek Grše playing a version of his persona).

Finally, in one apartment on the top floor, we have brothers Ronaldo (Stipe Jelaska) and Adriano (Zdravko Vukelić), who are the talk of the building. The other apartment at that level, however, is occupied by a young woman named Dijana (Ana Franić), who has an affair with her landlord and is about to spill the beans to his fiancée (Katarina Romac) who has come to collect the rent.

Judging by the inspired, breezy script written by the filmmaker himself, South Wind seems to be a passion project that has been simmering for a long time. There are certainly a few mistakes, but they are soon forgotten thanks to the sheer charm of the dialogues that discreetly open a path for well-placed puns and carefully picked pop-culture and sports references, while keeping the audience intrigued. 

All the actors in the cast, no matter how small their roles, are the ones who profited most from Marin’s writing and directing, as he keeps them in the most playful of modes. On the technical side, the mosaic structure of the film, which recalls the classical American “Suite” films, the works of Robert Altman and Quentin Tarantino’s Four Rooms, might have presented a challenge for the editor, but Ivor Šonje did his part with clarity, cutting the film down to an ideal 82 minutes. The cinematography by Krešimir Štulina captures the unique Split spirit, while the inclusion of Toma Bebić’s “schlagers” on the soundtrack serves both as a complicated-to-explain reference, and its purpose. In the end, South Wind is not just an inspired and sure-handed debut, but also a proper showcase of talent and a crowd-pleaser.

A Film a Week - Summer Teeth / Šalša

 previously published on Cineuropa

It is easy to label any seemingly unserious piece of cinematic work as “trash”, but sometimes, there is a method to the madness. Dražen Žarković’s Summer Teeth, fresh from its premiere at the Pula Film Festival, might not be the only Croatian film of its kind (some might remember Predrag Ličina’s 2019 zombie-infested political satire The Last Serb in Croatia, for instance), but it is carefully thought out and meticulously executed in every respect, so it could prove to be a cinematic hit in the wider region of the former Yugoslavia. Its universal humour, anti-nationalistic message, and the fact that the film is a co-production between Croatia, Serbia, Montenegro and Bosnia and Herzegovina might seem like good arguments to support this claim further.

Close to losing his poorly paid job and the flat he is renting, Zagreb-based student Vatroslav (Montenegrin actor Momčilo Otašević) accepts an offer from his co-worker and buddy Filip (Roko Sikavica, glimpsed in The Uncle) to replace him and help his grandmother Mariljka (Snježana Sinovčić Šiškov, seen in Safe Place) with the summer chore of harvesting tomatoes on the remote Dalmatian island of Little Head. Once on the island, Vatroslav is met with its inhabitants’ general quirkiness, which sometimes turns into open hostility. It seems that the only person willing to help him is local dentist Irena (Ivana Gulin, so far mostly active on television), while the others, including granny and the couple of Serbian tourists who are staying in her property, Mića (Ljubiša Savanović) and his heavily pregnant wife Jelena (Milica Janevski), might seem too eccentric to be helpful in any way. Furthermore, there is clear resentment between the youthful, party-loving island minority and the intolerant majority…

The isle and its abandoned military base from Yugoslav times harbour more secrets that will soon be revealed, once it emerges that the brandy that the granny uses as fertiliser is not just an alcoholic beverage, and the tomatoes laced with it cause a zombie epidemic among the inhabitants. After a tomato-fuelled fiesta, Vatroslav and his new buddies have to run from an angry mob of zombie-vampires with pointy teeth, led by two incompetent cops played by Slavko Sobin and Damir Markovina.

Working from a playful but solid genre script written by Ivan Turković Krnjak and Maja Todorović, Žarković – whose most recent filmmaking credits include two movies for children and youth, The Mysterious Boy and My Grandpa Is an Alien (co-directed with Marina Andrée Škop) – does a superb job of directing a smooth blend of an action-horror and a comedy-parody-satire by mixing both types of ingredients deftly to tell a story in a dynamic and easy-to-follow manner. His command of the technical crew is stellar, since the cinematography by Saša Petković is always appropriately kinetic and picture postcard-pretty in terms of the colours, and the editing by Saša Karakaš Šikanić keeps the movie in a high gear most of the time. With the help of the award-winning visual effects by Krsto Jaram, Summer Teeth is a pure joy to watch.

The same could be said of Žarković’s work with the actors, whereby he allows their interplay with one another pretty freely, channelling the palpable dynamic between the characters. Momčilo Otašević is a natural-born leading man with the capability to achieve a smooth transformation between confusion and assertiveness, which helps him with the transition between genre keys, and the chemistry he shares with Ivana Gulin is undeniable, while Ljubiša Savanović’s, Milica Janevski’s and Snježana Sinovčić Šiškov’s characters have the most comedic “juice”.

A Film a Week - It All Ends Here / Svemu dođe kraj

 previously published on Cineuropa

Everything has to end at some point, and legendary Croatian filmmaker Rajko Grlić supposedly decided to wrap up his career with a genre piece along the lines of a crime and political thriller, film noir, romance and satire all in one, which was also intended to rail against the corruption and the abuse of power deeply rooted in Croatian society. It All Ends Here premiered at 71st Pula Film Festival, the same place where Grlić showcased his feature debut, Whichever Way the Ball Bounces (1974), for the first time 50 years ago.

Written by Grlić and novelist Ante Tomić as their fourth collaboration, It All Ends Here is actually an adaptation of Miroslav Krleža’s 1938 novel On the Edge of Reason. The novel itself is tough to adapt owing to its structure of concentric circles, but the duo did a fine job of streamlining it and converting it to an eventful, linear plot that’s easy to follow and suits the genre cinematic approach. Their decision to move the plot from the first half of the previous century to a contemporary setting also proved to be a good way for them to make their point.

At the centre of the story we have lawyer Maks Pinter (Živko Anočić, seen in last year’s Pula entry Escort), who becomes fed up with serving his client, tycoon Dinko Horvat (played by Serbian actor Boris Isaković, best known for the role of Ratko Mladić in Quo Vadis, Aida?), after getting him off the hook for the murder of two trespassers, both former workers of a meat-packing facility that Horvat ran into the ground. Maks is willing to sacrifice his social status and even his cosy family life, so he turns to his former lover Nina (Jelena Đokić, glimpsed recently in 78 Days), who also has her own motives to try to hurt Horvat. Maks actually has a video that he can use to blackmail Horvat, but can the duo endure the pressure exerted by the powerful, psychopathic magnate, who also has strong political ties?

The main problem with the film lies in its dialogues, which sometimes sound as if they have been lifted directly from a work of literature and at times are overly theatrical. This is compounded by Grlić’s and Tomić’s tendency to speak through the characters in order to make a point, which is something that does not sit well with genre filmmaking that “likes” certain rules, but which cannot abide unsubtle didacticism. Also, this type of dialogue puts pressure on the actors to deliver the lines, which all of the leading trio do fairly well. Živko Anočić is a standout here, since those ambivalent types of characters suit him, while Boris Isaković does enough recycling of his preferred type of menacing characters to make Horvat compellingly scary, and Jelena Đoković adds a bit of craziness and vulnerability to the seductiveness of a noir femme-fatale type.

The technical aspects are also well done. Branko Linta’s camerawork uses a lot of bluish tones that suit the genre, while Tomislav Pavlic’s precise editing keeps the viewer engaged during the merciful running time of 89 minutes. Grlić’s directing is generally unobtrusive and invisible, so it lacks a bit of the flavour and flare much needed for a genre piece, but it does not overly hamper the film, which uses spoken threats as its primary fuel. With this “message over both style and substance” approach, It All Ends Here lands in the territory of a decent film that also serves up a strong statement.

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.

A Film a Week - Snajka: Diary of Expectations / Snajka: Dnevnik očekivanja

 previously published on Cineuropa

Tea Vidović Dalipi is not a filmmaker by trade. She is a sociologist, civil society activist, and active researcher in the field of migration and cultural identities. This varied background proves to come in handy for her debut documentary effort, the very personal observational and participative work Snajka: Diary of Expectations, in which she tries to tackle a number of serious and intertwined topics using the example of her own marriage. After ten years of filming and post-production, Snajka has enjoyed its world premiere as one of the special screenings at Dokufest.

The helmer opens her film with a long title card in which she defines the traditional Balkan term “Snajka”, which refers to a daughter- or sister-in-law, a woman who marries into a husband’s house and family, and therefore has to adapt and submit to the rules of the host’s family. In the case of her documentary, the “Snajka” is her, which she explains via voice-over narration over the top of home-video footage of her wedding with Mirsad Dalipi.

They met on a workshop for the theatre of the oppressed and married six months later. She is Croatian and he is a Roma man from Kosovo. Their economic and cultural backgrounds are so different that they are virtually incompatible, so they have to strike balances and make compromises in order for their marriage to survive the pressures from the outside and from within their own families. With the birth of their daughter Frida, some things become clearer, while others get blurrier.

The fact that Mirsad is technically unemployed and a formally uneducated musician who has to rely on getting enough drumming gigs does not curry favour with Tea’s parents, compounding their inherent cultural racism, while the racism he sometimes encounters from Croatian society in general is not just “cultural”. On the other hand, Tea does not want to be the stereotypical “spoiled white girl” when it comes to her relationship with Mirsad’s family, but she does not understand the customs or the unwritten rules, which nobody bothers to explain to her.

In the end, Snajka is not so much about her in her assigned role in his family and him in his assigned role in her society, as it is about the personal baby steps in establishing a dialogue and understanding between these cultures that are geographically close, but which culturally could not be further removed from each other. Its structure, however, makes it a proper “diary of expectations”, not just from one side, but from both. Sometimes, the dates are “printed” on the screen, but they appear without the relevant years, which does not turn out to be problematic in terms of following the progression of time. The technical quality of the footage shot by the filmmaker herself and Dinka Radonić with occasional help from others improves, and so does the married couple’s eloquence in addressing the issues between them, while their focus, of course, shifts from themselves and their needs to the needs of their daughter, whom they and their families love unconditionally. The sense of authenticity imbued in the material remains intact with little intervention, while the editing by Jelena Maksimović keeps the pace and the running time down to a pleasant 73 minutes.

Snajka: Diary of Expectations should be considered a filmmaking success, especially for a first-timer who essentially gained the requisite skills while filming it. However, its value as an eloquent start to striking up a dialogue between cultures is even greater than that.

A Film a Week - Escort

 previously published on Cineuropa

The death of Croatian filmmaker Lukas Nola last October saddened many people beyond the narrow framework of the Croatian cinema scene. Respected by colleagues and beloved by actors and crew members, he was regarded as one of the good spirits of his national cinema. His final work, Escort, has just premiered at the Pula Film Festival, and feels like the helmer’s last cry against the violence and injustice in the very fabric of Croatian society.

The protagonist, Miro (Živko Anočić, who collaborated with Nola on his 2013 film Hush), is a master in the commercial video business. We meet him on an alcohol- and cocaine-fuelled get-together with his buddies Dado (Hrvoje Barišić) and Berak (Igor Kovač). The last thing he tells them before each goes his own way is that he has never cheated on his wife, Darija (Hrvojka Begović), with whom he has two kids and is starting a new family life and business in the countryside. He is also a responsible person who would rather sleep in a hotel room than drive while drunk. But at the hotel, Miro gets a surprise visit from a young woman named Maja (Lena Medar), who says that she is from the agency and that everything has been taken care of. Miro assumes this is a prank from his friends and goes along with it, engaging in a sexual encounter with the call girl, sprinkled with more cocaine.

Afterwards, when he finds her on the floor unable to move or breathe, his first impulse is to call an ambulance and the police, but the hotel receptionist, Belc (Krešimir Mikić, effective as a well-spoken menacing presence), has other ideas to save both the hotel’s and the guest’s reputation: he enlists the help of the doorman, Davor (Nikša Butijer in one of the best roles in his career), who can arrange things for a small fee. From then on, the two men keep coming back to disrupt Miro’s idyllic life, asking for “small” favours that keep getting bigger and bigger. Where can he draw the line?

For the most part, Escort is an impressive work of cinema on almost every level. The dialogues consisting of vague threats and the stories which expose the blasé lifestyle of the upper layers of Croatian society as well as the lower layers’ ill-conceived rhetorical attempts at class combat are carefully written. The structure, consisting of longer scenes and sequences divided into shorter takes (most often in close up), also works quite well. Nola is also good with his actors, casting them in roles that fit their established strengths; Anočić, in particular, is at last able to show the wide range of his talent in the very complex role of a man embroiled in a very unpleasant situation, with a certain though not particularly firm moral compass.

The technical aspects of the film are also on a very high level. Frane Pamić shoots the highly stylised scenes masterfully, with stark contrasts of lighting between reddish indoor scenes and the blue-grey outdoors. The score by Aleksandar Pejovski, ranging from neoclassical to slow and moody rock, dictates the tense atmosphere, while Slaven Zečević’s sharp editing ensures that the two hours of runtime are not felt. The only problems come up with the second to last sequence, filmed in a vertical video format for no apparent reason, and whose wildness deviates quite a bit from the rest of the film. Nevertheless, Escort works well as a piece of social commentary and as a largely masterful piece of cinema.

A Film a Week - Traces / Tragovi

 previously published on Cineuropa

First-world problems are still problems. That sense of (impending) loss and loneliness becoming the predominant feeling in life is always the same, whether the one experiencing it is a well-off person with a comfortable existence, or quite the opposite. Sometimes, an obsession with something that could be seen as primitive or divine could, at the same time, serve as the one and only force driving life forward. This is the case with Traces, the feature-length directorial debut by Dubravka Turić, known for her editing jobs on Zvonimir Jurić’s The Reaper and Danilo Šerbedžija’s Tereza37, as well as for the short films she has written and directed, with the Cannes title Cherries (2017) being the highlight.

Traces world-premiered in the Warsaw Film Festival’s 1-2 Competition, while its screening in the main competition of the Zagreb Film Festival marks its national premiere. With some festival bookings already made, this Croatian-Serbian-Lithuanian co-production could become a regular dish on the menu of smaller gatherings scattered over the first half of next year.

The protagonist, Ana (Marija Škaričić, of Mare fame), suffers from an autoimmune skin disease that leaves discolouration marks on her face and hands, which she hides under layers of make-up. Otherwise, Ana is a doctor of anthropology with a job at a state institute, and is embarking on a book project about local burial customs. She is especially interested in so-called Mirila, meaning “measuring”, a custom in which a measurement of the deceased is taken using two stones, one at the head and one at the feet, with the headstone then decorated with personal symbols.

Naturally, she spends most of her work time in darkened rooms and archives, and in her own free time, there is no brightness either. She spends it in a huge, dimly lit apartment in central Zagreb with her ailing father (Mate Gulin) and rarely goes out with her friends (Lana Barić and Marina Redžepović, among others), whose topics of conversation revolve around the same immature stuff year after year. Once her father dies, Ana has to confront herself, her loneliness, her feelings, her prolonged grief and her obsessions with the symbols from the gravestones that she seems to see everywhere. Maybe a trip to her father’s village, the place of her happier childhood memories, and a chance encounter with a childhood friend of hers, Jozo (Nikša Butijer, spot on), could help her clear her mind and restart her life.

Škaričić is perfectly cast for the role, possessing an aura that can transform her from a quiet, lonely person dealing with her pain on her own into a more loosened-up and joyful character. The more jovial presence of Nikša Butijer as Jozo and the selection of actresses playing her friends complement her restrained performance perfectly. Since Ana spends most of her time on her own, the dialogue is not necessarily the key ingredient of the film, so Turić relies heavily on the pure audiovisual components, such as the use of light in the cinematography handled by Damjan Radovanović (who lensed Miroslav Terzić’s Stitches and Vuk Ršumović’s No One’s Child), the evocative musical score by Jonas Jurkunas, mostly on piano with a synth drone, and the sound design of Dubravka Premar.

Turić handled the editing on her own, so she keeps complete control over the film and its mood, and one of the gems in that department is a faux 1980s-style TV documentary woven into Ana’s research. The only potential problem with the film is its very loose structure with an arbitrary ending (the feature could be shorter or longer, but have exactly the same effect), but all in all, Traces is a compelling mood piece.

A Film a Week - The Head of a Big Fish / Glava velike ribe

 previously published on Cineuropa

It is not often, in the world of filmmaking and in the realm of Croatian cinema, that a film critic turns to filmmaking. Arsen Oremović started his work in cinema as a critic, before moving to filmmaking with shorts and short- and mid-length documentaries. The Head of a Big Fish, his feature debut, just premiered at the 69^th Pula Film Festival, where it also won one Golden Arena, handed to Lana Barić for best actress in a lead role.

From its plot description, loosely adapted from Ognjen Sviličić’s novel of the same name, one could expect The Head of a Big Fish to be yet another example of the Croatian variety of so-called Eastern European “miserabilism”, where war trauma is mixed with the trauma of life in a (post-)transitional society. The opening scene, in which we follow the protagonist, could fortify that notion. Nicknamed Tractor (Neven Aljinović-Tot in a rare big screen role), he lives alone in a crumbling house somewhere in the countryside by the river, wears leftover army clothes, pops pills because he has trouble sleeping at night, and even toys with the idea of shooting himself with his AK-47 left from the war.

However, his brother Andrija (Nikša Butijer, glimpsed in Hana Jušić’s Quit Staring at My Plate) has different ideas. In his daily grind as a cab driver in Zagreb, he waits for his lucky break, following a number of botched business opportunities and failed investments. He has just sold their parents’ house to a local big shot, and Tractor now has to move to the Zagreb apartment in which Andrija lives with his wife Vesna (Lana Barić, of Tereza37 and Eden fame). The chances for a man used to living alone to find peace in a busy city are slim, but Tractor has few options left and Vesna volunteers to offer him some help, or at least a sympathetic ear…

Essentially a three-hander chamber piece, The Head of a Big Fish relies on its actors to carry it, and Oremović’s work with them — based on a number of rehearsals prior to filming — is spot on, with the naturalism of the characters’ connections sincerely felt. Aljinović-Tot shows his potential for big roles in the everyman type, and so does Butijer. For her part, Barić also shows that a certain deglamorisation suits her well, as she is more than capable of channeling the empathy expected from her character.

The Head of a Big Fish may be the most realistic and most artful picture of the reality of Croatian society, where scars from the war are still fresh while new scars from the hardships of everyday life keep appearing. It is also a very carefully thought-of film, in terms of character-building, dramaturgy and directing, but unlike many films made by (former) critics and theoreticians, it does not feel cold and distant.

The careful attention to certain details in the background might be expected from a filmmaker who learned the craft by making documentaries (in its first third, The Head of a Big Fish plays out as a fine amalgam of observational and poetical documentary). But others, discreetly woven into the film’s dramatic fabric (such as Vesna’s ethnicity, hinted at only by some of the expressions she uses) still come as a surprise, especially when Oremović does not use them as plot points. In the end, The Head of a Big Fish could be described as a masterwork of toned-down, restrained, naturalist cinema.

A Film a Week - Even Pigs Go to Heaven / Nosila je rubac črleni

 previously published on Cineuropa

We already know that all dogs go to heaven, but what about pigs? They are among the most intelligent animals, somewhat trainable, but they also have strong personalities and can certainly be adorable in movies. So, 27 years after George Miller’s Babe, let us meet another very special pig, this time from the Zagorje region in Croatia, in the third feature film directed by the Croatian-American filmmaker Goran Dukić, best known for his debut, the American indie film Wristcutters: A Love Story (2006). Even Pigs Go to Heaven premiered in the national competition of the Pula Film Festival, and its next festival booking is just around the corner, at Motovun.

Narrated by the all-knowing Jesus Christ on the cross, and set in the hilly area of Zagorje (north of Zagreb) in the year 1991 when the war broke out in Croatia, Even Pigs Go to Heaven plays out like a light-weight comedy-drama about pigs and their human companions dealing with the hardships of life, love and the well-meaning but sometimes overbearing environment. Our human protagonist is Anka (Nataša Dorčić of You Carry Me fame), a smart and energetic village woman that has to handle various situations on the verge of scandal. Firstly, her goddaughter Ančica (Tesa Litvan) is about to get married to a hopelessly naive and seemingly mentally challenged man she does not love, while she carries the baby of the village priest in an environment where everybody knows everything and everybody judges everyone, but where discretion is an imperative of sorts. And secondly, her beloved sow Beba (voiced also by Litvan) really has the itch to mate for the first time. Anka has Rocky, a dark-haired, big and strong boar in her mind as a perfect match for Beba, but the trouble is that Rocky is Serbian and what would the village think of her while the young lads get mobilised into the army to fight against the Serbian aggression?

Silly as it seems, Even Pigs Go to Heaven is actually a love letter to the unique landscape and the unique mindset of Zagorje that combines religiousness, alcohol, hard work and humour with some of the nasty habits of gossiping, being judgmental and getting in conflicts with neighbours, friends and family members for various petty reasons, masked by a blend of sex, romance and the comedy of human nature that sometimes turns into a proper drama. Spiced up with emotions, decorated with cutesy animation and dressed as a period piece, detailed in terms of music and sound design, this film is certainly a demanding production that manages to keep the local taste while telling a universally understandable story.

The script written by Sandra Antolić (Branko Schmidt’s Agape and Once We Were Good for You) is quite detailed, rich in local flavours regarding customs and the dialect, while the basic story of human and animal love as overseen by a benevolent figure works in pretty much any language, both as a folktale and as an observation of human behaviour. Nataša Dorčić carries the film with zest and grace. On the technical level, everything is a top notch effort, like Branko Linta’s postcard-worthy cinematography, Iva Rodić-Novak’s production design, Morana Starčević’s costume design, animation and visual effects done by the co-production company Vertigo Visual and especially Ivana Fumić’s smooth editing, while the soundtrack consisting of jazzed- or rocked-up traditional songs (and those newly written that sound traditional) by the band Cinkuši is absolutely fitting. It seems that Even Pigs Go to Heaven was a meaningful project for all involved and that Dukić, who can certainly make a cute, feel-good yet extravagant film, also had a good time directing it.

A Film a Week - The Building / Hrvatskog narodnog preporoda

 previously published on Cineuropa

The town of Sisak, its (former) industrial heritage and the uncertainty of the modern times serve as an endless source of inspiration for Goran Dević, the Croatian filmmaker active mainly in the documentary format. The observational approach is also the backbone of his documentary filmmaking, and he uses it to make a point or set a new discourse without ever feeling preachy. He already demonstrated this with Steel Mill Caffe (2017) in which he listened to the “pub talks” at the factory bar over the course of its last operating week, as well as with his award-winning title On the Water in which he followed the life on all of three rivers that run through the town, asking some questions from the not-so-pleasant recent past.

Dević is now back to feature-length documentary filmmaking and back to Sisak and its former industrial pride, the steel mill, in his newest work The Building, which just premiered in the regional competition of ZagrebDox.

Using some old newsreel footage and archival TV material from the pioneering age of the media in Croatia and former Yugoslavia, Dević defines its principal subject, the titular building that once served as the centrepiece of the town within the town, constructed around the mill to provide housing for its growing workforce. Once the imagery is widened from the 4:3 to the 16:9 aspect ratio and the black and white colour scheme is dropped in favour of crisp digital footage in full colour, quite elegantly using the same neo-classical score to create the sense of continuity, we get to see the title and learn about the filmmaker’s primary object of interest.

Dević studies the building, once considered to be the peak of modern housing solutions and now seen as the relict of past times, and its inhabitants, over the course of a very specific yet very ordinary week in the summertime. An internationally recognised street artist from Zagreb is painting a huge mural on the building’s crumbling facade, and her act awakens curiosity in many of the tenants and anger in one of them in particular. An elderly lady whose health is crumbling waits to move to a church-owned retirement home, and gets to it too. Some new neighbours are about to move to some of the empty apartments, raising the suspicion of some of the tenants. In a twist of irony, those refugees are less than pleased with their new assigned accommodation. The other neighbours do they neighbourly stuff: looking for a missing cat, complaining about health, their children and their children’s health, having small talks on the bench in front of the building and making assumptions that the building’s basement has become the new home of a homeless person who used to be a factory worker.

Obviously, The Building is a testimony of changing times and of a place changing with them or against them, but it is also the testimony of Goran Dević’s great filmmaking skills and his strong voice in observing and tastefully commenting on the state that Croatian society is in. It is a bit unlikely that three major events (at least from the narrow perspective of the very building) would occur over the course of a single week, especially given that everybody pretty much complains that nothing ever happens there, but we can just take that leap of faith, since Dević rewards us with keen observations in wonderfully composed shots, executed by the film’s DoPs Damian Nenadić and Jurica Marković, while the inch-perfect editing by Jan Klemsche creates just the right amount of tension for most of the pleasant 68-minute runtime.

A Film a Week - Bigger Than Trauma / Veće od traume

 previously published on Cineuropa

Vedrana Pribačić started her professional path as a journalist and worked as a reporter and editor for several Croatian and international TV stations before switching to filmmaking. The highest point in her filmmaking career so far was the 2017 mid-length TV documentary The Factory Is Ours. Her feature-length debut Bigger than Trauma is set to have its international premiere at the upcoming edition of the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival, while its world premiere took place on the home turf, in the regional competition of ZagrebDox. Some festival exposure at Croatian and regional festivals should be expected before the film lands on TV, since it was made in co-production with Croatian Radio-Television.

Pribačić opens her film in a conventional way, with onscreen text explaining the known facts about the war in Yugoslavia in the 90s in which former neighbours, friends and spouses became sworn enemies, and a talking head interview with one of her protagonists, Đurđica. She was raped during the war by the people she knew from her hometown of Vukovar, and later entered and completed the empowerment program whose goal was to provide the necessary therapy for women victims of war crimes, where she later mentored new groups of attendees.

In the very next scene, Pribačić switches her approach to something more observational, as we gradually meet the “characters” of this documentary in their home environments and at group therapy sessions. The filmmaker focuses particularly on three women in the sessions, while the rest of the attendees and therapists of different professions, led by Marija Slišković, serve more as background pieces in the mosaic.

One of the women, Marija, was raped by her neighbours while she was their captive and tasked with duties at their headquarters; she felt shame she could not get rid of before she started therapy. Another woman, called Katica, has trust issues due to her trauma, which she hides behind a mask of toughness. The only Serbian woman in the group, Ana, was taken in captivity by the Serbian army and, while incarcerated and raped repeatedly, her Serbian neighbours ravaged her house. She suffers from loneliness and feels the urge to use verbal aggression to defend herself whenever she feels attacked by anyone. The film tells their story and the slow and painful process of their healing; only at the end do we learn that this successful program was discontinued due to a lack of funds.

Bigger Than Trauma might not be flashy in any way, but it is crafty enough due to Pribačić’s deft directing, and the framing that comes from the script she co-wrote with the film’s producer Mirta Puhlovski. Camerawork by cinematographer Dario Hacek serves the film well: unobtrusive, it provides the sense the characters are keen to open up to it. The sure-handed editing by Marta Broz, meanwhile, deserves praise for the sense of continuity it creates within each scene. The choice to have different ethno-sounding melodies as each character’s “theme” (selected by producer-screenwriter Puhlovski) occasionally feels wrong, but works well when an emotional key is used for decoding them. In the end, Bigger Than Trauma certainly is a heartfelt documentary that favours the characters’ emotions, their individual stories as well the one they share, over the film’s style.

A Film a Week - The Dawn / Zora

 previously published on Cineuropa

Dalibor Matanić’s The High Sun (winner of the 2015 Jury Award at Cannes’ Un Certain Regard competition) was arguably the biggest international success for Croatian cinema since the country’s independence. The prolific filmmaker revealed at the time that the film was the first instalment in an intended trilogy. The second part, The Dawn, has just premiered in competition at the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival.

The story is set in the dystopian near future of 2021, in a sparsely populated valley. A married couple, composed of Matija (Krešimir Mikić, the star of Predrag Ličina’s The Last Serb in Croatia and Rasmus Kloster Bro’s Cutterhead) and Ika (Tihana Lazović, whose role in The High Sun made her the rising star of the Croatian and European cinema) live with their two children in a shack. Poverty is the least of their problems, their relationship marred by unresolved issues revolving around the disappearance of their third child and a sense of the impending doom in the whole area driving out the population at such rates that even the local church is about to close.

Apart from Matija’s radio-amateur efforts, there is no TV or radio signal here, and enemy forces referred only as “them” are coming from the city, reportedly wreaking havoc on their way. Moreover, Ika and Matija are from different backgrounds: Ika from that of the village folk, and Matija from the city, which makes him look suspicious in the eyes of his neighbours who fear that he might be one of “them”. The two of them also find themselves on different sides of the dilemma about whether to move to the relative safety of the city, or to stay here and keep looking for their missing son.

The arrival of a stranger also named Matija (Slovenian actor Marko Mandić who also left the mark in German cinema with the role in Thomas Arslan’s western Gold) who decides to build his house close to the couple’s home, and of a religious woman (Nataša Matjašec Rošker) also named Matija, stirs the confusion further, both for Ika and for “the original” Matija. While Ika tries to find her true self in the material and religious world, Matija is engaged in a fight within himself, which he must win in order to protect the loved ones.

Contrary to the clear coding of “us” and “them” along ethnic lines in The High Sun, Matanić here goes for more complicated and abstract divisions, filling his film with a dense atmosphere and heavy-hitting symbolism. He is at his best when playing with supernatural elements, creating a kind of slow-burning horror and even an action sequence blended with musical elements near the film’s end. The characters seem to be mesmerised by bodies of water and lights, both natural and artificial, while the plot takes a turn at the break of dawn.

The actors are likewise at the top of their game here, mixing their strong instincts with the clues from Matanić’s script. Both Lazović and Mikić dig deep within themselves to channel complex emotions, with Mandić especially wild as he uses his natural expressiveness to channel a snake-like charm, while Serbian actor Boris Isaković is the film’s moral anchor in the role of the local innkeeper. Beautifully lensed by his The High Sun collaborator Marko Brdar, who makes the best of rural Italian locations, and rhythmically edited to perfection by Tomislav Pavlic, The Dawn is an outstanding work of cinema.