A Film a Week - My Dad's Lessons / Lekcije mog tate

 previously published on Cineuropa

It would be a relatively typical story: a woman prioritises her ambition over loyalty, relationships, friendships and family, leaves town and goes off to make it on her own in the “big, wide world” but ultimately fails, so she has to come back and face the music. Make no mistake, it would be different if that woman were a man because in movies, men get a shot at redemption, while women do not – the best they can hope for is some leniency from their milieu.

An individual’s dealing with the setting of a small town was also the topic of the directorial debut by editor Evi Romen, Why Not You (2020), but that movie revolved around a younger male protagonist and the trauma he survived but cannot exactly be open about. In Happyland, however, we have a woman as the protagonist and failure as the reason for her return. It has premiered at the Diagonale (where it won Best Original Score in a Fiction Feature into the bargain), and although it’s scheduled for national distribution this spring, its chances of international festival travel are slim.

Helen (Andrea Wenzl) is a stylish failure with a larger-than-life artistic ego. After causing the last in a string of scandals in London, she jumps in her Jaguar and drives back to her hometown in Lower Austria, where her mother (Michaela Rosen) owns the titular sports centre. Helen’s future is to manage it in a town inhabited by her die-hard fans as well as people she has crossed, such as her former friends and bandmates.

However, the appearance of an impossibly cool young man named Joe (Simon Frühwirth, the star of Gregor Schmidinger’s 2019 title Nevrland) rocks her world. He comes to her place of work as a candidate for the position of rock-climbing instructor, while he also plays drums with her former bandmates – but his true passion are horses, so his dream is to establish his own ranch. Maybe now would be the right time for Helen to have a serious conversation with her former partner Tom (Michael Pink) in order to learn something about the mysterious young man she is about to fall for.

The script, written by Romen herself, relies too heavily on an attempt to keep the “elephant in the room” under wraps for long enough so that the ultimate revelation will have the right impact. However, the dilemma is “phoned in” early on, so more seasoned viewers can easily guess what is at stake here. Also, the filmmaker’s ethics could be viewed as more than a tad conservative, since her protagonist is being punished for expressing her ambition, while illogically assuming that nobody from her social circle has ever travelled or lived outside of the town.

On the other hand, as a director, Romen manages to overcome these obstacles to a certain extent. She has a knack for nailing the small-town atmosphere, bristling with open secrets and petty feuds. Also, she grasps the trajectory of a (failed) musician’s career path from some kind of artsy, punk-rock scene to harbouring singer-songwriter ambitions. The choice of music and the inclusion of quasi-archival footage in appropriate formats is also quite fitting. Furthermore, Romen manages to get the actors in a very playful mode, and Wenzl uses her theatre chops to construct the big-screen role of her career. In the end, Happyland attains the level of a solid movie that has the potential to talk to regular audiences.

A Film a Week - 78 Days / 78 dana

 previously published on Cineuropa

In Serbia, when someone says, “During the war,” it refers to the 1999 NATO air campaign in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, as opposed to the other wars of the 1990s, strictly defined by the territories they were fought on. Different groups of the population have different memories of the 78-day springtime period of the aforementioned year: the adult men, especially those with recent military training, were drafted or feared being drafted; the women and the elderly were struggling to get by in the new, uncertain situation; while the younger primary- and secondary-school students remember the period for the abundance of time they had on their hands during the unplanned three-month school holidays in the spring, followed by the scheduled two-month summer break.

In some ways, the period was quite similar to the late-winter and spring lockdown in 2020 that forced some sort of unpleasant idleness on people: the global pandemic gave folks the illusion that they were staying together online, while being isolated within their family units, whereas the spring 1999 events gave the illusion of people being brought together in an isolated country. Documentarian Marko Grba Singh dealt with the parallels between the two periods in his 2021 documentary Rampart, mixing actual home videos with newly filmed footage. Emilija Gašić also uses the home-video format of Hi8 tapes to tell the fictional story and the experiences of three sisters in provincial Serbia during the spring of 1999 in her feature-length debut, 78 Days, which has just premiered in the Bright Future section of IFFR.

With their father (Croatian actor Goran Bogdan channelling his signature “everyman” energy) drafted into the army and their mother (Jelena Đokić, glimpsed in Celts) having to take care of the household on her own, the three sisters Sonja, Dragana and Tijana (played by newcomers Milica Gicić, Tamara Gajović and Viktorija Vasiljević, respectively) start filming their days on the home camcorder, over-writing some of the older recordings in the process. The arrival of two siblings from Belgrade, youngster Mladen (Pavle Čemerikić, of The Load fame) and his sister Lela (Maša Ćirović), in the house next door shakes up the dynamic between them. While precious little dictator Tijana and Lela quickly become the best of friends, a rift appears between the two older, secondary-school-age sisters, since they both take an interest in Mladen. The laziness of their idyllic days – characterised by forging friendships, singing “funny” songs that mock the world leaders from that period, and watching endless re-runs of one particular soap opera – is sometimes interrupted by planes flying overhead and air-raid sirens, reminding the characters and us, the viewers, that war is not an abstract concept that only happens to someone else.

With her film, Gašić aims to recreate her childhood memories and those of her generation through a “found footage” vibe. She achieves this through the perfect casting of non-professional actors in the main roles and professionals in the supporting ones, and through her consistent use of vintage, low-grade filming technology. The blends she achieves in this way are perfect, since the actors fit in with the scenery, which is enriched with further detail by Maja Đuričić’s production design and Senka Radivojević’s costumes, while the shots obtained by the actors themselves are carefully mixed in with those filmed by cinematographer Inés Gowland. This is further enhanced by the discreet sound design handled by Dora Filipović and some very compelling editing tricks employed by Jovana Filipović. 78 Days serves as a moody, emotional and sincere time capsule that takes us back to a very particular time and place.

A Film a Week - The Summer of '91 / Poletje '91

 previously published on Cineuropa

Slovenia was the first of the Yugoslav republics to secede from the federation and become independent after a ten-day war that happened in the early days of summer 1991. Although there is wide consensus in Slovenian society about the war and subsequent independence as a necessary move, the political parties and their voters are divided regarding the interpretation of the events. For the right wing, the war is key and is a starting point for the new mythology, while the left wing has more of a down-to-earth approach to the topic.

Slovenian cinema and the Festival of Slovenian Film (FSF) are not immune to this ideologically loaded question either, especially when there is a “round-number” anniversary. After last year’s call for artists to thematise the events from 30 years ago, this year’s edition of the FSF is hosting a new competitive section called Films 30, with five documentaries on the national topic. The Summer of ‘91, directed by Žiga Virc (Houston, We Have a Problem!), is one of those five films.

Known for his provocative approach to sensitive topics, based on unexpected revelations, both in his shorts (like the 2009 gem Trieste Is Ours!) and in his feature-length works (Houston… is a perfect example of a thought-provoking mockumentary), Virc opts for something completely different here – a relative lack of his own commentary and the assumption of an ideologically neutral stance on an ideologically charged topic. The Summer of ‘91 is actually a collage of collected home videos filmed by different people from all over the country in the time span from December 1990 and the plebiscite in which the inhabitants of Slovenia voted for secession, to the summer of 1992 and the first anniversary of the war.

The central piece of the film might be the events of the war seen through the lenses of the participants and the observers, but Virc also suggests that regular life that makes “small histories” was also happening during that period, albeit overshadowed by the “big history”. For instance, some people had their wedding scheduled for the very date of the beginning of the war, and some children happened to have their birthdays exactly during the peak of the military operations. Virc also opts to open and close the film with the same music ensemble performing Isley Jasper Isley’s “Caravan of Love” for the opening credits and The Shirelles’ “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow” for the ending sequence, closing the symbolic circle, showing life going on, for better or for worse.

However, the lack of narration and direct commentary on the footage does not mean that Virc doesn’t comment somehow on the events; he shows his political viewpoint just by the art of selecting the material for the collage, leaving the people in the footage to do the actual talking. Although the raw material has definitely been processed – different passages of it in a different manner even, so we can see the difference if the source material came from a humble VHS or more fancy Beta – there is no reason to doubt the authenticity of the whole thing. Technically, The Summer of ‘91 is a compelling work, with Matej Nahtgal’s sound design and image post-production being the highlights craft-wise, while editor Špela Murenc keeps the whole thing pacey and compact enough, clocking in at a pleasant 72 minutes in the end.