A Film a Week - Lunatic / Šterkijada

 previously published on Cineuropa

The central figure here is the filmmaker’s father, Jure Šterk (played by Janez Škof), a seaman and adventurer who was the first Slovenian to sail around the world and the first man to do so in a boat that was only 6.5 metres long. In January 2009, he disappeared in the Indian Ocean, following a technical issue with his vessel, the titular Lunatic, and his own attempt to fix it. Šterk was sailing around the world again, but this time, it was a non-stop trip, and since he was 73 years old at the time, if he had completed his voyage, he would have been the oldest person to do so.

However, Lunatic is less of an account of Jure’s maritime adventures, and more a study of the family dynamics Jure shared with his wife Vojka (played by Silva Čušin) and son Igor (played by Tito Novak as a child and Jernej Gašperin as a young man). Right from the start (the mid-1970s), one can see that said dynamics are volatile, as the opening scene is a heated argument in which Jure’s womanising clashes with Vojka’s jealousy, while little Igor is in bed, listening to his parents fighting. But when Jure is at home, he can be a fun father who bribes his son with scoops of ice cream to get him to do some more swimming and who smuggles him into a music school so he can practise the piano. However, Jure can also be a strict disciplinarian who does not tolerate the carefree moments of childhood.

Jure can also be pretty careless himself, which is amply demonstrated in the next sequence, set during the 1991 Slovenian War of Independence, in which Jure jeopardises his planned trip around the world, for which he accepted sponsors’ money and got into debt, so he can take part in the war. But even when he triumphantly completes his quest in 1994, he does not wish to rest on his laurels, so he thinks up new outings and manages to persuade Igor to invest in a newer, bigger and more advanced boat. As Jure’s actions get less and less predictable, Vojka slips into superstitions and alternative medicine, which brings on physical illness, and Igor, unable to strike a balance between these two selfish and impulsive people, starts to snap under the pressure.

In the script, Šterk might have been aiming for some more humour of the absurdist kind and some more warmth to balance out the toxicity of the family relationships, but in the end, Lunatic serves better as a densely packed, intense family drama in which Jure’s absence can be as stressful as his presence. Šterk’s tone is sincere, rendering his motivation to try to figure out how living with these two people affected him completely believable. However, his execution in the form of long, dialogue-driven scenes puts a lot of pressure on the actors, who sometimes lose control and end up in the realm of theatrics.

Technically, Lunatic is an accomplished work. Miloš Srdić’s cinematography smoothly transitions from the warmth of the 1970s, through the murkiness of the 1990s, to the coldness of the new millennium, the production design by Marco Juratovec is fabulous, while Petar Marković’s editing keeps the running time more than pleasant at 77 minutes. However, a less linear approach could have generated some additional tension and – why not – added some lunacy to the picture.

A Film a Week - No Man Is an Island / Septemberska klasa

 previously published on Cineuropa

Back in the Yugoslav times, military service was compulsory for young men between the ages of 19 and 27. They had to leave their homes and their lives in order to spend a year away paying their duties to the country. Slovenian filmmaker Igor Šterk, known for his fiction films 9:06 (2009) and Come Along (2016), remembers his days of service in the Yugoslav Peoples' Army in his documentary No Man Is an Island that premiered at the 24^th edition of the Festival of Slovenian Film in Portorož.

Šterk opens his film with excerpts from home videos from his personal archive, with his own quite poetic narration on the topic of seas, sailing and islands, stating that his love for the sea and sailing prepared him for the military service in the navy. He was stationed in a small garrison named Smokovo on the island of Vis in nowadays Croatia in the late 80s. Smokovo and most of the other military objects on the island are now abandoned, but back in the day, the whole island was dubbed The Fortress of the Adriatic Sea.

Šterk then turns to tracking and interviewing his ex-comrades from all over the former country in order to reconstruct the personal and collective memories about the year they spent there. He starts by describing the first encounter with the place and people there, goes through the basic training and, due to specific circumstances and structures of both formal and informal power, some excessive hazing performed by the “older” soldiers at the expense of the “younger” ones, and ends with their days of routine and leisure when they achieved the status of “elders.”

The Slovenian title of the film, September Class, which actually suits it better than the international one, is explained only in the last third of the film when their commanding officer appears: the recruits who came to service in September were regarded as the “cream of the crop” and as guys with a lot of potential, since they were, in average, college boys, better educated and smarter then the rest of the bunch. Unfortunately, that also explains the torture they were exposed to during their days as rookies – the reason for it was the other guys’ envy.

The film is at its best when it sticks to interviews. Šterk's position is quite special: he is the insider with his own memories, but he lets his buddies, many of whom he has not seen for two or three decades, do the talking. Those interviews are quite informal and take place at the men's houses and yards, so the interviewees, ten of them, are relaxed enough and have enough time to reveal themselves as complete and complex personalities.

However, the drone shots of the island and the now abandoned rotting military objects that are used as a filler of sorts become inflationary, touristy and even a bit sensationalist, while the music in different instrumental arrangements, from piano and acoustic guitar to wind instruments, feels over-bearing on certain occasions. There is also an elephant in the room that Šterk barely addresses and fails to examine in depth – the destiny of the country that fell apart a few years after the guys' service, and the question of whether they had to take part in the events of the early 90s. But all things considered, No Man Is an Island still serves as a legitimate artefact of personal memories around one particular institution at one particular period of time.