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 - Oh, What Happy Days!

 previously published on Cineuropa

A conference call involving two to five parties. The shadows of the past. Political and class conflict. Unearthed secrets. A deal to be made by any means necessary, including blackmail and deception. All of this is to be found in Homayoun Ghanizadeh’s very unusual, even peculiar, avantgarde film Oh, What Happy Days!, which has just premiered in the Critics’ Picks competition of the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival.

Actress Homa (Golshifteh Farahani in her first role in an Iranian movie since she went into exile) is being blackmailed by Hashemi (Navid Mohammadzadeh), who possesses a compromising tape. Hashemi was the son of the head servant at her family’s compound before the 1979 revolution, and now he may or may not be a state agent. In order to avoid public shaming because of the viral video, she must persuade her exiled grandfather (“godfather of Iranian cinema” Ali Nasirian) to make a deal with him on the compound, or otherwise the government will seize it. To achieve this, Homa tries to rely on her aunt (renowned artist Shirin Neshad) and her uncle (Payman Maadi), both exiled as well, to help persuade this stubborn old man clinging to decades-old grudges.

Forced into a Zoom call that plays out in real time, Homa comes to know a piece of her family and her country’s history, and becomes aware of political and class conflicts before and after the revolution. She also gets to know the truth about the deaths of her father, who was framed in the turbulent post-revolutionary times, and her uncle, who never reached adulthood, and what the term “happy days” (referring to the times before the revolution) really means to people from different walks of life. The price of happiness for the chosen few was paid by many…

What we see is the same medium-close-up shot from a fixed position mimicking the angle of a laptop camera, either in a single shot or on a screen divided into up to five sections. The composition and placing of the individual shots in the mosaic sometimes suggests a code of sorts, whether it concerns class, age or current degree of power. The “costumes” the characters are wearing are the same – ie, prison uniforms – and the production design consists of the same barren wall, a desk and a chair. Usually, it is all in black and white, but it sometimes gets infused with colour, for an obvious reason or for seemingly no reason at all.

Homayoun Ghanizadeh, who also has a background in theatre, describes his method for Oh, What Happy Days! as “suitcase cinema”, since it was filmed in different locations, from Iran to the USA, via Paris, with the director travelling between the actors. The result is an avantgarde, risky piece of cinema that speaks volumes about the past and the present, displacement, separation from one’s home country and its culture, and even the feeling of being trapped inside it, since in this case it is ruled by a crumbling regime that refuses to give up.

The question here is how long it will take for the main gimmick (which might remind us of the dreaded “COVID-19 cinema”) to wear off, but the answer might surprise us. The story is engaging and is told fluently and naturally, in a way that does not insult the viewer’s intelligence, plus the top-notch acting by these contemporary and erstwhile stars of Iranian cinema channels a plethora of emotions. Oh, What Happy Days! might even open up a completely new avenue in cinema.

A Film a Week - 3670

 previously published on Asian Movie Pulse

At least theoretically, we understand what it means to be a member of an underprivileged minority and some of us even had practical experiences in that department. Being a “double minority”, a member of minority on two aspects, is a bit more extreme setting most of us know nothing about. The thing is that there is not a mathematics formula to be used in counting and measuring loneliness, isolation, lack of privilege or emotional pain.

In his feature debut, “3670”, the Korean filmmaker Park Joon-ho tries to envision one such situation. The film has been on the tour of festivals since its premiere this spring, and we caught it at San Diego Asian Film Festival.

Cheol-jun (Cho You-hyun) is a North Korean deflector living in Seoul in and around the community of his compatriots. They all attend the same college preparation classes and the same church services, so one might assume that their community is a close-knit one, or that the rest of the South Korean society is hesitant to accept them. However, Cheol-jun fears discrimination within the and expulsion from the group, so he hides one crucial thing about himself from his buddies: the fact that he is gay.

Since the hook-ups via the phone app do not give the desired results for him (Cheol-jun wants a relationship, while the rest of the users, like the one seen in the opening scene, are there just for some casual sex), he finally summons some courage to attend the meeting / blind dating event with some guys from the South. However, once they learn that he is a deflector, they lose the last interest they had in him.

The exception to the rule of rejection comes at his part-time job at a store where he encounters Yeong-jun (Kim Hyeon-mok) who also attended the meeting and lives in the area. He becomes Cheol-jun’s friend, romantic interest and the guide to the seemingly vibrant Seoul gay scene where both young man seem to feel liberated. However, Yeong-jun also has some secrets that he keeps…

The title “3670” is actually a code the young gay men in the film use in their texting communication, and the fact they have to communicate in codes reveals a sad truth about the daily life of a gay person in Seoul. There is a certain code of conduct: whatever happens behind the closed doors stays there, and there is no way that it comes out to the public limelight. But is not it the case with the most of the countries and their societies in our world?

It seems that, like his protagonist, Park Joon-ho has to deal with two sets of problems in the South Korean society, with a difference that the character has to find his place under the sun, and the filmmaker has to expose them to the audience. In Park’s case, it seems that he bit more than he could chew. Although the slow exposition of the characters’ backgrounds and a number of lower-intensity subplots they spawn might seem like a detailed road map for the actors to create a compelling characters, it burdens the core story with excessive minutes of runtime.

Park has some directorial tricks up in his sleeves, like the use of the hand-held cinematography by Han Sang-kil that gets calmer as the protagonist catches the ropes of his life. Unfortunately, the filmmaker is also his own editor, which takes a toll in the terms of pacing. The actors do more than a decent job to make “3670” a watchable experience. The leading duo shares some on-screen chemistry, while the rest of the cast, including Jo Dae-hee as the most popular guy in the club, get enough screen time to create solid episodes. However, Cho You-hyun is the star of the movie, channelling the shyness and almost virginal naivety of his character.

Noble intentions and the necessity to address the country’s structural injustices aside, “3670” is sometimes too big, too clumsy and too “engineered” for its own good. Simply put, the execution does not match the ambition, which is a dead giveaway for Park’s lack of experience. A more streamlined version could have worked better, both with the festivals’ committees and with the regular audiences.

A Film a Week - Active Vocabulary

 previously published on Cineuropa

Preparations for war do not begin on the frontlines, or even at military training facilities. No, the narrative is laid out in the media for adults, and even at school for children. It seems unethical, and it is even forbidden outright in advanced Western democratic societies (although a teacher is allowed to intervene when students start expressing extremist or totalitarian worldviews), but it is a common practice in societies with lower democratic standards. Sometimes, the indoctrination is subtler, but in the case of Russia, it is completely obvious and very extreme. We were able to see it in this year’s hit documentary Mr. Nobody Against Putin, co-directed by David Borenstein and Pavel Talankin. The latter is a former teacher but also the film’s primary subject, narrator and cinematographer, who shared his experiences of the soul-crushing system of propaganda and recruitment of young people for cannon fodder.

The winner of DOK Leipzig’s German Documentary Competition, Yulia Lokshina’s Active Vocabulary, deals with the similar experiences of another teacher from Russia who had to leave her country, her position and her family behind in order to seek political asylum abroad. Back in 2022, Maria “Masha” Kalinitschewa was recorded by a student in her small English-language class of four when she shared her thoughts on the war in Ukraine, labelling it unjust and potentially disastrous both for Ukraine and for Russia. The candid mobile-phone recording reached the students’ parents, but also Masha’s colleagues and superiors. Threats were made against her, and she and her mother were even investigated by the FSB for scrawling anti-war graffiti on a wall in their village in the Russian Far East. Masha managed to escape to Germany, where she, with her new class of Berlin kids, wants to make a re-enactment of the incident that forced her to leave her home country.

But this is just one of the plot lines in Lokshina’s self-produced, micro-budget documentary essay laced with a few experimental touches. The Russian-born, German-based filmmaker also narrates her own experiences with the Russian school system and migration to another country at primary-school age, a specific ban that effectively outlawed political indoctrination in West German schools in the 1970s and is still in effect post-reunification, and a seemingly unrelated 2021 incident in which a group of female activists tried to stop a New Moscow construction project in a wooded area close to the Russian capital.

It seems that the topics Lokshina deals with have little in common with each other, apart from creating a consensus that today’s Russia is a totalitarian place where the orders from above show little concern for the ideals of justice, common sense, ecology, and individual and collective well-being. However, the essayist approach allows for these kinds of analogies, loose metaphors and abrupt jumps between topics. The use of JS Bach’s suites as the musical background is effective, as is the simple, hand-held camerawork by Nina Wesemann, while the satellite still photos and archival footage previously obtained by Lokshina herself are deftly edited into the material by the filmmaker and Maya Klar. The standout aspect is, however, the 3D animation by Felix Klee that exposes Russian delusions of grandeur with a model of the “monster school” that is being built in New Moscow, lending it an X-ray-like quality. In the end, Active Vocabulary emerges as an on-point, engaging and thought-provoking documentary.

A Film a Week - The Lost Dream Team / Izgubljeni Dream Team

 previously published on Cineuropa

Sports are often the source of national pride and unity: the whole nation tends to come together and stay behind an individual or a national team. But in the former Yugoslavia and the countries that succeeded it, fandom for an individual sportsperson or a national team is raised to the level of mythic adoration. National sports-powered “mythos” sometimes even gets epic proportions in an “alternative history” imagination. Some say that the collapse of Yugoslavia became possible after the unfortunate loss of the football national team against Argentina in the quarter-finals of the 1990 World Cup in Italy. Others harbour a conspiracy theory that the Americans were so frustrated with their college basketball players losing to Yugoslav teams that they forced the International Olympic Committee to change the rules regarding the professionals competing and created their own dream team of the best NBA players.

After a fantastic career in the short format crowned with the 2015 EFA award for Picnic and his fiction-feature debut Mater (2019), Croatian filmmaker Jure Pavlović has decided to try a new format – the feature-length documentary combining sports and the political drama of the Yugoslav basketball national team’s last hurrah at the European Championships in Rome in 1991. The premiere of The Lost Dream Team closed the 72nd edition of the Pula Film Festival. Judging by these events’ place in the collective memory all over the West Balkans, and by the rather universal angle Pavlović takes to accommodate international audiences, the film should have a healthy festival run, a theatrical release in several countries, and a prolonged exposure on television afterwards.

Throughout the 1980s, the Yugoslav men’s basketball national team became a powerhouse at continental and world championships, as well as at the Olympics, with players like Dražen Petrović, Vlade Divac, Toni Kukoč, Dino Rađa, Saša Đorđević, Predrag Danilović amongst others. The match in the finals of the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona never took place because Yugoslavia ceased to exist a year before, and the dissolution was followed by a bloody war. It was in fact during the very week of the European basketball championship in Rome that Slovenia and Croatia seceded from Yugoslavia and the short-lasting war in Slovenia broke out. After winning the championship, the national representatives did not have a country to return to.

Jure Pavlović interviews all the players from the national team as well as their head coach Dušan Duda Ivković and the team manager, but the focal point is Jurij Zdovc, the only Slovenian on the team, who was called by the government of his “new country” to leave the national team (and his comrades and friends) because of the Yugoslav aggression on Slovenia. Zdovc was also the focal point of a newspaper article written by Croatian journalist and novelist Boris Dežulović that actually inspired Pavlović to take a dive into the topic and the memory from his own childhood.

The result is a finely made classical documentary mixing sports and politics, to cathartic effect for the audience that remembers the events, and creating curiosity in younger spectators. Pavlović's approach, combining national television and private archives as well as newly shot interviews with the players and staff members, functions well thanks to the slickness in Dario Hacek’s camerawork, Julij Zornik’s masterful sound design and Ivan Vasić’s editing which turns the talking heads mode into something more artistic. The Lost Dream Team might seem like a simple piece of nostalgia, but it is also a deeply moving piece of cinema.

A Film a Week - Bright Future / Viitor luminos

 previously published on Cineuropa

The abrupt fall of the long-lasting dictatorship of Nicolae Ceauşescu in Romania seems to be a trendy topic in the realm of national cinema lately. Tudor Giurgiu dealt with it in his docudrama Freedom (2023) and Bogdan Mureşanu did so in his hyperlinked mosaic The New Year That Never Came (2024), while Vlad Petri also touched upon it in his documentary Between Revolutions (2023).

Producer-turned-filmmaker Andra MacMasters chose a different angle for her documentary and directorial debut, Bright Future, which could, for the most part, serve as a “prequel” of sorts to the aforementioned events. After its premiere at last year’s IDFA and a screening at this year’s edition of CPH:DOX, it is now playing in Beldocs’ The Battle for Reality section.

MacMasters opens the film with archival footage of Lenin’s monument being transported and placed on its pedestal in Bucharest, showcasing the conviction of Romanian communists and their dedication to the cause. She will come back home for the poignant ending, but in the meantime, the filmmaker takes us on a trip to Pyongyang, where the 13th edition of the World Youth and Student Festival took place. The large Romanian delegation had an especially honourable status there, owing to the “extraordinary friendship” between Ceauşescu and North Korean leader Kim Il Sung. It was the summer of 1989, and the collapse of the regime was just six months away.

The festival itself was organised by the World Federation of Democratic Youth and the International Union of Students. For the latter, it was the last edition of the gathering: it would also be declared illegal later that year owing to its ties with communist regimes. The festival itself was not ideologically strict, as it brought together 20,000 people from left-leaning youth and student organisations from 177 countries, but the fact that it took place in the immediate aftermath of Tiananmen Square exposed the divisions between the delegations from the West and those from the communist countries. However, some topics they did have in common, and those topics are still present in the global left-wing discourse: the colonial past and neo-colonial present; the fight for human, women’s and gay rights; the fight against capitalism, imperialism and climate change; the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; and support for the oppressed.

The footage filmed by amateur filmmaker and educator Emilian Urse shows us the atmosphere of the festival: the theatrical ceremonies, the heated debates and the parties where we can witness oddities such as the whole hall singing and dancing to the Korean-language cover of the Modern Talking song “Brother Louie”. Through it, we can see the youthful, idealistic zeal and the high hopes for a “bright future”, as well as the political games that were being played on that level as well. Although we know that the end of the Cold War was near, the subjects remain completely unaware of it, despite some warning signs.

But in spite of the film containing some clandestinely obtained footage (the abundant use of fish-eye lenses is a dead giveaway), it is quite “creative” as a documentary. Most of its narrative material comes from printed sources, which vary from communist countries’ official press publications to Western press and archives, and it is read out by voice actors in a variety of languages off screen. It is deftly welded together by editor Andrei Gorgan, but it still remains very much Andra MacMasters’ work both in terms of the research and the overall finished product. On the surface, Bright Future might be about the past, but it challenges its viewers to reflect on their present and future.

A Film a Week - Peacemaker / Mirotvorac

 previously published on Cineuropa

There is a consensus, of sorts, on the level of the whole of Croatian society that the Homeland War, or the War of Independence, in the 1990s was inevitable, and the division between the sides was simply black and white: the Serbs were war-mongering aggressors, while the Croats were victims caught off guard by how the situation developed, so their resistance against the aggressor was purely heroic. The war leaders and commanders are still regarded as heroes, while the efforts of those who had tried to defuse the tense situation before it exploded into a full-blown war are swept under the rug. One of those unsung heroes is Josip Reihl-Kir, the protagonist and title character of Ivan Ramljak’s newest documentary, Peacemaker, which has just premiered at ZagrebDox.

Reihl-Kir was the chief of the Osijek Police Department, which covered the area near the Croatian-Serbian border. As the ethnic tensions in the region mounted over the course of one year, from 1990-1991, he was the authority figure that was trusted by both local Croats and Serbs, so he used this fact to avoid the open armed conflict, or at least delay it for as long as possible. However, the “hawks” on both sides misinterpreted his words or publicly attacked him for cowardice. On 1 July 1991, he was assassinated by a Croatian paratrooper, Anton Gudelj, who was convicted for his act, but only much, much later. Peacemaker portrays the last year of Reihl-Kir’s life in an atmosphere that leads to bloody conflict.

Collaborating with journalists Hrvoje Zovko and Drago Hedl in the script department, Ramljak creates a documentary that plays out like the tensest of crime-thrillers, although the events and the people they involved are not exactly unknown in Croatia. Relying on multiple narrators, such as business owner and Croatian Army volunteer Nikola Jaman, former security service operative Zdravko Pejić, local journalist Goran Flauder and, to a minor extent, local politician Gordana Ajduković and Reihl-Kir’s widow Jadranka, Ramljak re-tells the events from 34-35 years ago with clinical factual precision, but also constructs the archetype of a narrative movie, positioning Josip Reihl-Kir as its hero, and political and paramilitary leader Branimir Glavaš as the villain.

Peacemaker is equally stunning on the directing level, since it is quite creative in playing with our expectations and overcoming the objective obstacles in terms of the very material included in the film. It is an archival type of documentary, but the actual archive footage or photo material regarding Josip Reihl-Kir is neither extensive nor varied enough to construct the feature out of that alone. Ramljak fills in the blanks with archival footage on other topics (one of the most stunning sequences provides a prologue and an epilogue to one iconic TV clip where a tank crashes into a small, old car), and with home-video shots that show daily life in the city of Osijek and its surroundings during that period, revealing the increasingly tense atmosphere. Ramljak is clinical in that department as well: the footage and the narration match perfectly and serve the story, but some praise also has to be reserved for the inspired editing by Damir Čučić.

With Peacemaker, Ivan Ramljak once again proves himself to be a contemporary master of documentary cinema. This is a film that requires complete and utter silence in the darkened theatre hall – preferably even without blinking. It is absolutely gripping and is a bona-fide masterpiece.

A Film a Week - The Funeral / Cenaze

 previously published on Asian Movie Pulse

Although Turkish cinema scene is more associated with mainstream art house efforts, its more genre-oriented pole is also quite strong and recognized globally. One of the newer examples of it, a multi-genre crossover “The Funeral” written and directed by Orcun Behram is touring the festivals since its world premiere at the last year’s edition of Sitges. Most recently, it was showcased at the official competition of Grossmann Fantastic Wine and Film Festival in Ljutomer, Slovenia, where it scooped the main Viscious Cat award.

Behram opens his film with a sequence mostly located in a hearse van touring the back roads of Turkey to a small village graveyard where a funeral takes place in the rain. Its purpose is to establish the character of our protagonist, the driver named Cemal (Ahmet Rifat Sungar, best known for his roles in Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s “Three Monkeys” and “The Wild Pear Tree”) as a loner and a man of few words who possibly holds a secret. Soon enough, Cemal is approached by his colleague with a hush-hush offer he cannot really refuse. His job is to make a certain corpse disappear for a period of time, until the situation settles, so it could be buried properly, and the reward for his effort would be a hefty, but not unbelievably large sum of money.

Initially, Cemal is wary that the offer might be a set-up, but he reluctantly agrees. The corpse he should carry around for a month or so belongs to Zeynep (Cansu Türedi who built her career on Turkish television), supposedly a victim of honour killing done by her influential family. Cemal drives the van away, checks into a no-questions-asked roadside motel and engages in his routines of chain-smoking and solo-drinking, until he hears some not-quite-dead noises coming from the back of his van. Well, Zeynep is a bit undead and quite hungry, and, since Cemal develops certain feelings for her, he starts caring and providing for her, urging them to be constantly on the move, while the police starts the search for a serial killer. However, there is no safe place in the world for the two of them, not even Cemal’s native home, and the day of meeting with Zeynep’s family is approaching…

“The Funeral” is a genre salad of sorts, blending the ideas of the road movie, “necromantic” comedy, love-on-the-run, horror and revenge thriller and doing so in a pace that often tests the audiences’ patience during the (almost) two hours of runtime until the make-it-or-break-it moment for the ending. To do so, Behram has to exercise the full control over the material in order to converge the interesting ideas he has towards a point. There is a constant threat that the multitude of ideas would take the film over, but the filmmaker barely manages to hold a grip over them.

The first of the film’s strong points is the acting. It is not a surprise that Ahmet Rifat Sungar is reliable in a role of a cryptic loner, since those roles suit him well. On the other hand, Cansu Türedi is a proper revelation of the film, since the actress nails the role with limited means of expression, given that her character does not speak. The supporting actors also create a rich tapestry contributing to the second of “The Funeral’s” strong points – its atmosphere. The realistic bleakness of it is conjured in the drained colours in the work of the art director Tuncay Özcan and the cinematographer Engin Özkaya who also lensed the filmmaker’s previous film “Antenna” (2019). However, Burk Alatas’ editing could have been a bit firmer.

But the reason the film mostly succeeds in making a point is the point itself. Behram packs a punch against the inherent conservativism, patriarchy and misoginy still present in the Turkish society, but is smart enough to hold it until the right moment. However, marketing “The Funeral” as a purely genre experience does not do the film any favours, since it serves better as an example of a hybrid of a genre- and an art house movie.

A Film a Week - Novi Sad Remembrance / Novosadsko sećanje

 previously published on Cineuropa

Some events can morph into regional or national trauma that can last for decades, or even centuries. In the case of the city of Novi Sad in Serbia and its South Bačka surroundings, the traumatic event in question is something people simply refer to as “The Raid”, which took place in January 1942 in the wider context of World War II and the Axis advances, followed by gruesome war crimes against civilians. The event itself, the remembrance of it privately and officially in Novi Sad, and the ever-changing official narrative around it are the topics of Aleksandar Reljić’s sophomore feature-length documentary, Novi Sad Remembrance, which has just premiered in Beldocs’ national competition.

The events around the raid itself are well known. The pretext for the occupying Hungarian forces’ punitive expedition in South Bačka county were attacks by local partisans on Hungarian and German troops. The first raids took place in villages in the north of the county, such as Čurug, where the forces killed Jewish and Serbian civilians, throwing their bodies in the Tisza and Danube rivers before moving south to encircle and raid Novi Sad. The total number of victims, mainly women, children and the elderly, was around 4,000, one-third of them in the very city of Novi Sad. The perpetrators were members of the Royal Hungarian Army and some Hungarian civilian volunteers loyal to the occupier. There was also one episode that stands as an exception to the rule of senseless massacre: in the village of Kovilj, the local Hungarian army and civilian authorities succeeded in protecting their Serbian neighbours.

The historical basis is pretty much fixed, but Reljić uses the device of following a protagonist. Secondary-school sociology professor Marija Vasić speaks about the Holocaust in Novi Sad, to her students, family members and at public lectures, and she also writes books revolving around survivors’ stories, for which she also interviews two elderly men (Dr Teodor Kovač and writer Ivan Ivanji, both of whom died earlier this year) and one woman, Marta Flato, who was a baby back then and was saved by sheer luck. Vasić radiates conviction and therefore serves as an excellent protagonist in Reljić’s simple and effective directorial approach that gets the story told, which is to be expected, bearing in mind his background as an investigative journalist. The technical components, such as Goran Velemir’s camerawork, Zlatko Zlatković’s cutting and Vladimir Drašković’s sound design, also do so in an unobtrusive manner, while the mournful score by Mihajlo Obrenov and Milan Kerezović Keckec on piano and strings seems like an obvious, but fitting, choice.

When it deals only with the historical facts of the raid, Novi Sad Remembrance seems like a simple, TV-friendly, educative and informative documentary, but both the filmmaker and the protagonist harbour more activistic ambitions, at least to problematise how the events are remembered and how different narratives around remembrance are constructed, depending on the political moment. In that regard, neither of the two is afraid to get openly political, but never in an overly ostentatious manner. It’s too bad that these particular layers did not get more screen time, since it would have made the film appear a little more poignant. Nevertheless, it would be unfair to say that Novi Sad Remembrance is anything less than a solid, to-the-point documentary.

A Film a Week - Pelikan Blue / Kék Pelikan

 previously published on Cineuropa

“The smell of freedom in the air...” In an Eastern European context, that phrase clearly conjures up the late 1980s and early 1990s, when the boxed-in communist states began to open up to the West’s capitalist goods and its way of life, which also brought freedom to travel, regarded as an essential element to enable young people to get acquainted with the big, wide world beyond the borders of their state. But what can a young person dying to live life to the fullest do if financial resources are scarce?

Working from an idea by Son of Saul producer Gábor Sipos and Gábor Szentpáli, and using audio interviews from the 2010s as his basis, filmmaker and animator László Csaki has composed a unique animated documentary that could serve as one of the answers to the above question. Pelikan Blue opened the Critics’ Picks Competition at the Black Nights Film Festival and feels ready to take the film-festival world by storm.

In some fast-paced narration that we hear over the imagery, deriving from different approaches to animation and even comprising some short bursts of filmed archival material, the narrator gives us a brief background story before introducing us to the three leading characters, young men named Ákos, Petya and Laci. They wanted to travel to the West but had no money, so they had to hustle a bit. An opportunity presented itself in the guise of the lo-tech way in which Hungarian Railways dealt with their international tickets: they were all hand-written on paper, with the titular carbon paper used to make copies, and were protected only by stamps. Led by Akos’s analytical, scientific mind, the guys came up with a scheme involving imported bleach, indigo paper and copied stamps to forge the international railway tickets.

Their first trip to Scandinavia went without a hitch, so they kept on indulging in trips all over Western Europe in the early 1990s. But word of their adventures got out and, pressured by their friend Rozi, who had his own list of clients, and spurred on by Petya’s urge to help a girl he liked, their operation first became a clandestine “service” for friends, and then a large-scale and somewhat lucrative scheme that attracted the attention of both the ticket inspectors and the police.

Combining a documentary foundation, an animated approach and a certain reliance on the tenets of a fiction film, Csaki takes the best of all three worlds and combines them with ease in order to tell a magnificent, nostalgic and heart-warming story, while jumping between the two timelines – one from the 1980s and 1990s, and another from the 2010s – leaves enough space for thought and reflection. Since the fast-paced narration serves as the primary means for plot delivery, animation was pretty much the only way to go. Blending the simple 2D foundation with some figurine animation and even filmed archival material suits the purpose very well, while the animation team’s attention to period details, such as the changes in fashion and scenery in the transitional times, is simply stellar. The passing of time is further commented on through the soundtrack, which emphasises it by using different genres of popular music that emerged over the 1990s.

Stitched together masterfully by Daniel Szabó and compressed to a pleasant running time of under 80 minutes, Pelikan Blue is the type of film that leaves a permanent smile on the viewer’s face. It has the power to make us believe that, not that long ago, the world was a far better place.

A Film a Week - Patient No. 1 / Patsient #1

 previously published on Cineuropa

The early-to-mid 80s in the former Soviet Union were known as “the time of state funerals,” given that party leaders and heads of state were dying in quick succession one after another. They were old when they “inherited” power and were basically the tools of a system that was running on fumes and powered by inertia. Georgian filmmaker Rezo Gigineishvili takes us back to that period of time with his newest feature Patient #1, which has just opened the official competition of this year’s Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival.

When we meet our protagonist, a nurse named Sasha (Olga Makeeva), her primary concern is to prepare her singing act for the nurses’ ball that is about to take place in the hospital. Out of the blue, she is selected, interviewed by a high-ranking party member (Igor Chernevich) and approved to become the primary nurse who discreetly takes care of a very special patient. That patient is none other than the Secretary General (Aleksandr Filipenko), a man in such ill health that he can barely support his vital functions, but one who still believes that he has real power.

At first, it seems like a job like any other, for which Sasha’s special skills of being discreet, polite and unobtrusive come in handy. But the situation is way more complex for her, for the hospital, for the Party and for the whole state. Simply put, different players have different requests, political and personal, for the Secretary General whose mind is not quite sound, and most of them see Sasha as the designated channel of communication. She has no other option than to try to balance different powers greater than herself, and she cannot take any rest. The questions are “why?” and “for how long?”, and the answer may lie in the motto that power is never to be given, but always to be taken.

Rezo Gigineishvili has made a career directing commercials, music videos and Russian-language repertoire romantic comedies before achieving notoriety on the film festival circuit with the based-on-true-events Georgian-language film Hostages in 2017. That film was similarly set in the 1980s and likewise dealt with a system running on its own inertia, through the story of a futile attempt by a group of young, West-leaning intellectuals to escape by hatching a plan to hijack a plane. With Patient #1, the period is the same, but the mood is even gloomier. There is no youthful enthusiasm or dreams of escape, and even when Sasha manages to sneak away for the night to blow off some steam at a dance party, the Party has no trouble finding her.

Gigineishvili masterfully commands the sombre mood. The narrow aspect ratio, the desaturated colours of the interiors and the brutalist angular buildings in the rare exterior shots make the point on their own, as do the contrasts between the usually static shots that depict the reality and the hand-held ones that show the darkly dreamy, almost nightmarish insights into the mind of a person who thinks that he still has power. The mood is further coloured by Giya Kancheli’s score which moves from a minimalist, almost atonal palette at the beginning, towards the neoclassical, before finally ending in the rock realm.

The performances are also inspired throughout. There is more than a drop of Jessica Chastain in Olga Makeeva’s interpretation of Sasha, which comes handy for the interplay with the rest of the ensemble. Veteran actor Aleksandr Filipenko proves to be a perfect choice to portray both the fragility and the conviction of a dying party leader, while one scene is enough for Inna Churikova, playing his wife, to deliver an acting masterclass in her final big screen role.

Deliberately slow-paced to communicate a sense of gravity, Patient #1 serves as an evocative reminder of bygone times. As such, it is also a potent comment of our current times which also run on fumes and inertia.

A Film a Week - Power / Moc

 previously published on Cineuropa

Someone wise once said that politics is the art of the possible. In order to achieve some common goal often described as the greater good, the interested parties have to make deals and compromises using money, power, influence and services as currency in deal-making. The trouble is that there is no strict definition of the greater good and no manual on how to define it. A seemingly ordinary but actually very complex situation illustrating this conundrum stands in the centre of Mátyás Prikler’s sophomore feature Power, which premiered earlier this year at IFFR and was just shown in the Network of the Festivals in the Adriatic Region programme of the Zagreb Film Festival.

It all starts with a hunting accident in which a young local man named Adam gets killed. Since the local police and the forensics cannot trace the bullet to any of the local hunters’ rifles and the hunting party included some high-ranking politicians, it becomes a sensitive question. Steiner (Szabolcs Hajdu), a former lawyer now employed in security services, is tasked with conducting the investigation with utmost discretion. The ailing man, who only has a few months left to live, reluctantly accepts the offer from his chief (Roman Polák) in order to provide some extra resources for his family.

The investigation gets him into the orbit of several players in the ethnically mixed part of the country. There is the family of the young victim, who want justice to be served. There is the suspected shooter, minister Berger (Jan Kačer), who is the official candidate for the role of EU strategic water commissioner and whose opponent runs on the platform that would allow the privatization of the water resources — neither he nor the government can allow for such a scandal to be made public. There is also a journalist (Lucia Kašová) in search of a big break, and a high-profile political scandal might serve her cause perfectly. Finally, there is a disgraced former cop named Ondris (Mihály Kormos) who might serve as an ideal fall guy and might want to make such a deal. Each of the characters mentioned, Steiner included, has some sort of a moral compass, which makes the ideal scenario less possible.

If judged simply for its merits as a political thriller, Power is bound to fail since there is almost no mystery about the event, the actions or the motivations of the characters involved, making the ending too logical and too neat. However, the film functions way better as a drama about ethics powered by moral dilemmas and as an examination of deal- and compromise-making. 

The script, co-written by the filmmaker himself together with Marek Leščák, is ornamented by realistic details of life in a multi-ethnic and multi-lingual provincial environment and largely populated by firmly drawn characters that nevertheless leave actors plenty of room for interpretation. Actor and filmmaker Szabolcs Hajdu seizes the opportunity to play Steiner in a restrained manner with a lot of integrity, while Jan Kačer as Berger does something similar but in a slightly higher emotional register.

In terms of direction, the frequent use of one-take scenes, framed with a sense of symmetry and filmed from fixed positions and from various distances, serves the film well. The execution on the part of the cinematographer Gergely Pálos, who shoots them in wintery tones that add to the cold atmosphere, is also astute, while the piano and strings score by Zsófia Tallér highlights the seriousness of the topic and Matej Beneš’ editing keeps the structure clear and the format efficiently compact. Power might not be the most philosophical or deepest study of the titular term crucial to politics high and low, but it works well in its simplicity and clarity.

A Film a Week - Once We Were Good for You / A bili smo vam dobri

 previously published on Cineuropa

Since his seminal film Metastases, Branko Schmidt has positioned himself as an eloquent critic of the way things are in Croatian society, which seems to be in a state of permanent transition and crisis. In his newest film, Once We Were Good for You, which just premiered at the Pula Film Festival, Schmidt has rejoined forces with his Metastases and Vegetarian Cannibal star actor René Bitorajac to paint a picture of an almost-failed state centred around the Croatian Independence War veterans and their confrontation with the government about the Steam Mill building in Zagreb that was planned to become a war museum.

The nature of the clash between the veterans and the government is financial and legal (they want to keep the almost ruinous building where they used to have military training during the war in the early 90s, while the government has other plans for it – the construction of a shopping mall), but for most of them, the real cause for rebellion is the feeling that they do not get enough respect for their previous war efforts which cost them dearly, physical and mental health-wise. The leader of the rebellion and of the ensuing negotiations is Crni (translatable as Black), played by Slaven Knezović, dressed in an appropriate black uniform. Since the rest of the crew he could assemble fits into the profile of the used-and-discarded losers, he tries to enlist the help of the almost legendary war hero Dinko Ćosić (Bitorajac) to act as the face of the rebellion and make the counter party show some respect.

While Dinko is reluctant to get involved at first, he stays because of his friends who are there and for one of the neighbourhood kids who is hired by the veterans to draw the graffiti on the building facade, in whom he sees a surrogate for his son who does not want to speak to him anymore. Step by step, Dinko gets more and more engaged into the struggle, efficiently taking command regarding the “war tactics,” while Crni tries to negotiate with the government representatives and the police forces. However, Dinko, a damaged man himself, is scared about two things: whether the intentions of his comrades are sincere or the whole protest is to become just another shady deal, and the infiltration of right wing forces which threaten to hijack the rebellion and use it for their own causes.

Working together with Sandra Antolić and Ognjen Sviličić on the script (based on the idea of Josip Mlakić), Schmidt manages to paint a complex and heavily contextualised but still universally recognisable picture, in a very compact format of just 72 minutes. Surely, some things are sacrificed in the process, like deepened relationships between the characters (apart from the main two, the rest function better as a group character) and even a more profound characterisation of the protagonist. The openly political angle also sets in all of a sudden and the film could profit from more action and confrontation, but the modest budget and the circumstances of filming, which took place at the peak of the pandemic, did not allow it. On the other hand, with an almost improvised approach to acting (which is actually Schmidt’s preferred method of work) and the marvellously choreographed scenes in long, continuous takes by a hand-held camera operated by first-timer Dario Hacek, and with tension coming from Damir Avdić’s soundtrack consisting of one of his songs that also serves as the verbal illustration of the protagonist’s dilemma, Once We Were Good for You is a dense, thought-provoking and engaging film experience.

A Film a Week - Johanna Dohnal - Visionary of Feminism / Die Dohnal

previously published on Cineuropa

It seems that, with the current state of things in global economics and politics, some of the heroes of the past are being systematically forgotten, and some of the rights and liberties they worked so hard to attain for the people have to be defended – or even fought for – again and again. One of these heroes was late Austrian politician Johanna Dohnal, a socialist and a feminist whose work in the fields of women's and labour rights stretched beyond a strictly national context. The documentary Johanna Dohnal - Visionary of Feminism, directed by Sabine Derflinger (known for docs such as One Out of 8 and Hot Spot, as well as the fiction features Day and Night and Anna Fucking Molnar), which puts the iconic politician firmly in the spotlight, recently premiered at the Viennale.

The strictly Austrian scope of the documentary offers little chance of a wider international release, even though a number of parallels can be drawn with contemporary trends and social issues in the whole of Europe. However, its TV-friendliness and the clarity of Derflinger's storytelling might pave the way for a decent performance in this kind of market.

From 1979-1995, Dohnal occupied two different offices within the Austrian government: first as State Secretary for Women's Rights and Issues, and from 1990, as Minister for Women. During that period, she fought for the redefinition of gender roles (striving to offer other career options for women as well as introducing parental leave for men), granting maternity leave and guaranteeing pension rights for female farmers, establishing shelters for women and children who had been victims of domestic abuse, and making marital rape legally equivalent to extra-marital rape. She fought hard for gender quotas and saw them as a tool to enable women to be represented in a political landscape dominated by male representatives and officials, rather than as a goal, per se. Aside from being a feminist, she was also a committed socialist who came from a working-class background and knew the life of working women only too well. In her politics, labour rights were tightly connected to women's issues, and she saw economic dependence as one of the principal tools of oppression.

Derflinger examines Dohnal's influence on her immediate environment, portrayed through the testimonies of her widow/domestic partner Annemarie Aufreiter, her daughter Ingrid Dohnal, her granddaughter Johanna-Helen Dohnal, public figures (such as various artists, performers, journalists and contemporary feminists) and society as a whole. The filmmaker also tracks the politician's career, covering its rise during the times of Bruno Kreisky's tenure and its fall during the era of Franz Vranitzky, when Dohnal fell victim to different political pressures and to the global adoption of the neo-liberal model, even within the ranks of leftist political parties.

Over the course of the movie, Derflinger makes use of the usual, tried-and-tested methods from the arsenal of documentary filmmaking, such as talking-heads interviews with the subjects conducted in their home or work environments, and archive TV material in which Dohnal has to defend her political agenda, which she does eloquently and passionately. The most poignant moments are the excerpts from Dohnal's personal diary, with which Derflinger opens and closes the film. The steady camerawork by Christine A Maier and Eva Testor and the precise editing courtesy of Niki Mossböck suit the material well, which makes Johanna Dohnal - Visionary of Feminism easy to watch and to follow – and this is very necessary for such an informative and socially charged documentary.

A Film a Week - Moments of Resistance / Widerstandsmomente

previously published on Cineuropa

Every period of time presents a range of things that must be resisted, and resistance against abuse or repression is an ethical obligation for any responsible citizen in a civilised society. In her documentary film essay Moments of Resistance, Austrian director Jo Schmeiser tries to join the dots between the glorious days of the anti-Nazi resistance in the late 1930s and early 1940s, and contemporary movements that are standing up to capitalism, patriarchy and racism as the main forms of injustice that are threatening society. The film has just world-premiered at the Viennale.

Schmeiser combines a number of different approaches and techniques, which are largely dictated by the various materials she introduces in the film. Individuals from contemporary civil society are interviewed directly in front of the camera, where they present their views, standpoints and the actions undertaken by their organisations. Sometimes this is humanitarian or legal aid for refugees and asylum seekers; sometimes it is self-defence classes for migrant women. On the other hand, there is a lack of living witnesses to the past, so Schmeiser relies on the testimonies recorded in the period from the 1980s until the early 2000s, and she tastefully and cleverly sets them against images of people working in the factories and the fields, highlighting the class background and the political views of the anti-Nazi resistance fighters. Schmeiser also introduces other types of materials from the Archives of the Austrian Resistance in Vienna, so we get to see letters that the executed members of the resistance cell sent to each other and to their parents, but also other written materials, such as handwritten leaflets produced during the war and texts from songs and poems, like the one that opens the film, Our Town Is Burning by Mordechai Gebirtig (1938), translated from Yiddish, and even whisper jokes that she simply uses as title cards.

The connection between the two forms of resistance is not that obvious, since the methods of exerting pressure and demonstrating resistance have changed dramatically over that period of time, so the viewers are tasked with finding the similarities and differences themselves. Schmeiser, however, bridges that gap with a subject that she introduces early on, a middle-aged Argentinian woman now working in the Austrian civil sector, who was a political prisoner during the military dictatorship. Her testimony and her advice on how to stand in solidarity with fellow inmates is a crucial piece of the puzzle in this film. The other connection is the predominant presence of women in both the movements back in the day and nowadays, making gender equality a long-standing goal that has not yet been accomplished completely.

Schmeiser has managed to communicate a clear message and to make an important and timely film. Her technical skills are impressive, her presentation methods are meticulous, and even her manipulation of the material (the audio recordings were cleaned up in post-production, and some of the objects she films appear in different contexts) renders the final product even more polished. She had an enormous amount of help from her numerous subjects and her small crew. Cinematographer Sophie Mantigneux and editor Michael Palm do a good job of taking the different kinds of material and fusing them into a coherent movie that has a strong impact.

A Film a Week - In Character

previously published on Asian Movie Pulse

The young Chinese filmmaker Tracy Dong has made her debut in the realm of feature-length documentaries with "In Character". Her background in filming performance arts is evident in her unique and provocative approach that combines the two seemingly unrelated topics: contemporary filmmaking and a certain period in Chinese history seen through the prism of personal memories and beliefs. In Character is still touring the festivals since its premiere at the last year's edition of Gothenburg Film Festival and caught our eye at Chinese Visual Festival.

By her own account, Dong has started the project with the intention to examine the position of actors in the contemporary Chinese cinema, but ended up somewhere else - deep in the territory of history, politics and the gap between the different generations in the society of China regarding the lifestyle, ideas and experiences. The frame for that is a fiction film by the veteran director Ye Jing imagined as a combination of a pious epic and lyrical reflection of the period of his youth during the Cultural Revolution.

The actors coming from a completely different social and political framework (being born in the times of One Child Policy), apart from knowing a song or a parole or two from the revolutionary period, cannot actually relate to it. The idealism and the dedication of the revolutionary generation to the cause of building modern China and to its leader, Chairman Mao, is unknown and even incomprehensible to the ones that grew up with privileges in a materialistic oriented modern world. So the director wants, if not to teach them a lesson, than at least to demonstrate the spirit of the revolution to the actors by taking them to an abandoned ammunition factory deep in provincial Sichuan. Things escalate quickly since the visit to the factory is not intended to be a field-trip to the Chinese Communism theme park, but an immersive experience for the actors who must wear Red Guard uniforms, sing songs and live by the same rules as their fictional characters, including a brutal simulation of a Party hearing where a man who has "sinned" against the Revolution must repent through self-criticism in front of a committee.

No matter how this practice might seem obsolete and brutal from a nowadays perspective, it was pretty much "business as usual" in a variety of communist countries. And since communism was never a compact set of ideological beliefs, the Chinese Cultural Revolution doctrine was brutal even for its totalitarian standards. However, for Ye Jing and his generation, it was something acceptable and the director holds the idealism of the time in high regard and is put off by the spoiled attitude of his actors. On the other hand, the invisible, but ever-present Dong is closer generation-wise to the actors (for that matter, so is your humble reviewer), so she sympathises with them, while also being stunned and even fascinated by the brutality of not just Ye Jing's experiment, but also the brutality of the system and people's ability to quickly fall in with it.

Dynamically shot using the hand-held camera and competently edited by Eddie Xing, "In Character" is a handsome and interesting watch that provides the unique and honest insight into dealing with the totalitarian past and generational gap in the present. Because of its unique approach, it works on a completely different level than most documentaries on either historical or professional themes would.

A Film a Week - The Divine Order / Die göttliche Ordung

Did you know that Switzerland, known for its political and military neutrality, long-standing peace, social well-being, cheeses, products of precise mechanics and banks, was one of the last countries to introduce women’s right to vote? On the confederal level, it happened in 1971, that means after the whole sexual revolution thing, and it took another 20 years for the last canton to incorporate it into its constitution. The reason for that can be a combination of factors including less stressful life than in the rest of Europe in the first half of the 20^th century and a strong influence of tradition and Christian religion (Catholic and Calvinist, no real difference) keeping “the divine order” in which a women is subdued to her man and both of them to God.

The Divine Order, written for the screen and directed by Petra Volpe (of Dreamland fame), is a fictionous account on women’s fight for the voting right set in the microcosm of a small mountain town. During its course we shall see the transformation of its heroine from a submissive anti-feminist housewife to a jeans-wearing revolutionary, her gradual acceptance of her own sexual needs, the transformation of other women from silent and obedient wives to a community capable of reaching its political goals and also the transformation of town’s men from boorish chauvinists to civilized, understanding husbands.

The trajectory of the story is somewhat predictable, but there are some surprises, insightful and comedic moments along the way. The writing is precise, the directing is more than competent, there is a plenty of visual polish with all the early 70’s look, the editing is spot-on, and the format of 96 minutes is very audience-friendly. On the other hand, subtlety is not the name of the game here.

We meet our heroine through the voice-over narration about all the nice and exciting things as Woodstock, sexual revolution and human rights movement far away over the seas and all of that bypassing Switzerland, especially its rural regions. Her name is Nora and she is played with grace by German actress Marie Leuenberger. The choice of the name is not accidental – her start is not dissimilar to the title heroine of Henrik Ibsen’s play. Our Nora is married to Hans (Maximilian Simonischek, son of Peter), a boyishly good-looking soon to be entry-level manager in the local factory, takes care of their two sons and her father-in-law and she seems content doing so. But when she sees the injustice her brother-in-law does to his wife Theresa (Rachel Braunschweig) and especially daughter Hanna (Ella Rumpf, known for her part in Raw), she gets interested in the whole referendum thing. With the help of a former innkeeper Vroni (Sibyle Brunner) and an Italian divorcee Graziella (Marta Zoffoli), she is ready to fight for her rights.

Volpe usually succeeds in blending the serious activist drama with a small-town comedic undertones. That is not so strange since the whole premise is a bit absurd: the future of women’s voting rights will be decided by men only and maybe not the meanest, but the most eloquent antagonist of the film is actually a woman working on a high position for whom the social status is more important than basic human right. The films hits its emotional peaks through the interaction between the large women during the Lysistrata-like strike subplot, and the cerebral ones in the moments of satisfaction that grown men can also learn that the times are changing and that doing housework will not kill them or make them gay.

However, linking the whole thing with the echoes of sexual liberation falls flat down somewhere around the midpoint – aiming for easy laughs about middle-to-old-aged women learning a thing or two about there vaginas, orgasms and sex in general during a visit to a protest in Zurich, it gets more than a bit unpleasant in the scene with a Swedish new-age therapist of sorts. There is no doubt that political and sexual revelation are connected in more than one way, but here it simply does not work neither as a statement nor as a running joke comic relief. Still, as a political and social drama with some nice absurdist touches, The Divine Order is quite alright.

A Film a Week - The Boss: The Beginning / Gazda: Početak

When Dario Juričan’s début documentary feature The Boss came out in 2016. its subject Ivica Todorić was still considered the captain of industry and his company Agrokor, even though burdened with huge debt to foreign creditors, simply too big to fall. The situation now is somewhat different: Todorić is a fugitive from the law and a blogger exposing his private and professional connections with different Croatian administrations and Agrokor, still too big to fail, fell under the state-sponsored management trying to “solve the crisis”. It is safe to assume that he did not fall from grace because of the documentary itself, but let us hope that it at least contributed, even as “bad press” about the topic. However, until recently, the film did not have a regular distribution and was not shown on television since media did not want to upset “The Boss” and his friends in high politics, which is a textbook example of corruption in Croatian society.

Anyhow, Juričan and his investigating team decided to go further in the past and examine another big boss, the one who got filthy rich in the time of war using his political connections, the one who is actually convicted by the court of law. The subject of The Boss: The Beginning is Miroslav Kutle, the tycoon from the deep 90’s and the boss of the first wave of privatization in Croatia. His Globus Group was involved in different branches of business, from restaurants, bakeries, retailing, media, real-estate and so on, intertwined with banking and financial industry on the national level and sanctioned, if not by the government, than by the structures of the party in power. Kutle made most of his money by draining the firms he acquired “for peanuts”, through financial scam or by government decision. He now lives in Bosnia and Herzegovina where he walks freely due to legal loopholes.

The chief value of the film is an informative one, both for Croatian viewers to remind themselves of the chaotic privatization and the regional ones to get some kind of insight to it. Juričan constructed the story around his subject and gave us a look into the different aspects of society that was too concentrated on war, politics and nationalist propaganda to see a robbery going on masked as the transition from socialist to free market system, with all the “creative accounting”, threats of violence, and plain old forgery included. His choice of persons he interviewed is more than interesting and covers all the spectre politically and intellectually, from washed-up politicians, war-time buffoons, douchebags and nitwits (some of them actually defending Kutle after all) to respected lawyers and journalists.

Aside of talking heads in the interviews and rarely used archive material, Juričan fills the gaps with situational shots of cities and city streets, empty, devastated buildings and footage of his travelling by car or bike and his investigating in archives. From the cinematic point of view, The Boss: The Beginning is a run of the mill news documentary, almost ideal for television, but not inspired and inspiring enough for the big screen, with the graphic of rats leaving the screen by the end of the film being its only comment.