A Film a Week - Ida Who Sang So Badly Even the Dead Rose Up and Joined Her in Song / Ida, ki je pela tako grdo, da so še mrtvi vstali od mrtvih in zapeli z njo

 previously published on Cineuropa

Ester Ivakič’s debut feature, Ida Who Sang So Badly Even the Dead Rose Up and Joined Her in Song, might have a ten-year-old protagonist and coming of age as its primary topic, but its vibe is way darker than one would expect from a children’s film, which is a genre that has become very popular in Slovenian cinema after the success of Slobodan Maksimović’s Beanie and Klemen Dvornik’s Block 5. Its premiere in the main competition of FilmFestival Cottbus, rather than in the children’s and youth sidebar of another festival, confirms this notion.

When we meet Ida (played by newcomer Lana Marić), it might seem as though she lives an idyllic life. She is growing up in the countryside, has both of her parents, Ivana and Stanko (played by Judita Franković Brdar and Matej Puc), by her side, and has a strong connection with her grandmother (non-professional actress Milena Stropnik). They all seem well off, and they are about to build a new, bigger house.

But soon enough, the cracks start showing. Grandma is old and ailing; the parents both have their quirks and differences in character, so they are seldom on the same page; Ida is something of an outcast in her class, ruled by a sadistic teacher (Lara Maria Vouk); and her only friend and fellow outcast, Terezka (fellow newcomer Liza Muršič), is turning into a religious fanatic. Ida’s inner fantasy world can only protect her from this harsh environment (and after all, it is socialist Slovenia, then part of Yugoslavia, in the 1970s) for a little while, and even in that inner world, she has a mission to accomplish: believing that her angelic singing can save her beloved grandmother from death, she decides to join the school choir. The trouble is that Ida is tone-deaf…

The plot is meandering and slow-moving, while some of the subplots seem simply tacked on to the main story, which can get a bit frustrating over the running time of close to 110 minutes. This is to be expected from a film that is an adaptation of several short stories from Suzana Tratnik’s collection Neither Voice, and Ivakič and her co-writer Nika Jurman at least try to intertwine them into a single narrative.

However, Ida Who Sang So Badly… is clearly less about the plot than it is about the atmosphere. This is discernible from the polished cinematography abounding in dreamy landscapes by Rok Kajzer Nagode and the soft editing with regular cross-fades by Andrej Nagode. The score by Alenja Pivko Kneževič and Simon Penšek, and the suggestive sound design by Samo Jurca serve the same purpose. The same can also be said of Lana Marić’s performance, as the child actress nails the metaphorical absence of her character, while the supporting performances by Judita Franković Brdar, Matej Puc and Petja Labović serve as a reliable anchor for the lead actress and for the movie itself.

It seems that Ester Ivakič wanted to create a mood piece with her debut, something that would show off her considerable talent, and she has succeeded in her ambitions up to a point, as Ida Who Sang So Badly… is a moody, gloomy coming-of-age movie that displays a great deal of skill. It might open with “Once upon a time,” but it would be naive of us to expect it to end with “And they lived happily ever after,” since there is nothing that can prepare us for impending loss and nothing that can prevent it.

A Film a Week - Whites Wash at Ninety / Belo se pere na devetdeset

 previously published on Cineuropa

In 2018, Slovenian writer Bronja Žakelj debuted with her autobiographical novel Whites Wash at Ninety, in which she, as a character, has to deal with a troubled childhood and youth during the 1980s and early 1990s, as she has to contend with tragedies and the passing of her loved ones. It became a bestseller in her home country and was later translated into eight more languages. Seven years later, the film adaptation of Whites Wash at Ninety by Marko Naberšnik, who also co-wrote the script with the author, has premiered at the 31st Sarajevo Film Festival, in the Open Air section.

Young Bronja (Mei Rabič) is growing up in a vibrant household with her brother Rok (Jaka Mehle), mother Mita (Tjaša Železnik), father Janez (Jurij Zrnec) and grandmother Dada (Anica Dobra). Just as she is about to finish primary school, the first tragedy strikes, as she loses her mother to cancer. The second happens just as she finishes secondary school and starts her further studies, as she (with Lea Cok taking over the role) gets diagnosed with lymphoma. Shortly after she gets better, Rok (Žiga Šorli plays the part in adulthood) gets killed in a fatal climbing accident, and Dada gets ill and eventually dies. Bronja cannot count on much support from her father, who seems only to be passionate about politics and the end of communism, nor from her friends or boyfriends, who can scarcely cope with the intensity of her life. However, luckily, she always has something to live for.

As he demonstrated in his previous works, Marko Naberšnik is capable of handling multiple characters and directing actors as an ensemble (Rooster’s Breakfast), pulling off an epic story unfolding over an extended period of time (Shanghai Gypsy), and paying a lot of attention to period details, even when working on a tight budget (The Woods are Still Green). The latter is definitely the strongest point of Whites Wash at Ninety, since there are no flaws to be found in Maja Moravec’s production design, Nadja Bedjanić’s costumes or the authentic props deftly captured in Max Sušnik’s cinematography. On the level of each individual scene, Naberšnik showcases his precise execution.

The trouble, however, stems from the script, as the director and the novelist do not manage to “translate” the story or the emotions it carries from one medium to another. With the help of editor Milica Jelača, they have tried to introduce flashbacks to break up the chronological order and make the film appear more cinematic, but some more serious errors can be observed in the almost non-existent character development, as most individuals come off as borderline caricatures relegated to a single trait or emotion for a certain portion of the film, or even for the duration.

Lea Cok does her best to convince us of Bronja’s resilience and determination to go on with her life, and Tjaša Železnik channels Mita’s ethereal energy in the flashbacks, but Jurij Zrnec repeatedly hits the same notes as Janez, and Serbian star Anica Dobra seems miscast for the role of Dada. Dobra does her best, as she usually does, but the role of a caring granny does not suit the naturally glamorous thesp.

In the end, Whites Wash at Ninety might be viewed as way less than the sum of its parts, some of which are outstanding. It’s an example of something getting lost in translation between the media of literature and cinema. However, the status of its source material might make it at least a minor hit on home turf, despite the movie being so clunky.

A Film a Week - The Mountain Won't Move / Gora se ne bo premaknila

 previously published on Cineuropa

Usually, documentary projects spend more time in development and production than fiction ones do. Having two projects premiering some two months apart at reputable festivals is an oddity which has happened to Slovenian filmmaker Petra Seliškar this year. After the premiere of her mid-length effort My Summer Holiday at FIPADOC in January, the filmmaker now presents her feature-length work The Mountain Won’t Move at Visions du Réel. It is no coincidence, though, because the two films share the same subjects, location and topic.

Seliškar takes us up into the Šar Mountains, where three brothers, Zekir, Zarif and Zani spend several months a year looking after their family’s flock of hundreds of sheep and their dozens of cows. The youngest, Zani, stays in the lower hut with the cows, while Zekir and Zarif venture to the upper “bachilo” stone-and-wood house with the sheep. During the summer, their younger brothers join them to learn the trade and provide help. Their life is free from the burdens of modernity, but also quite dangerous owing to the harsh weather and even harsher beasts. Luckily, they have a large number of shepherd dogs to protect them and keep them company. Zekir serves as the leader of the brothers and the teacher, preparing them to continue the centuries-old tradition, but as Zarif grows, he expresses an interest in trying out a different, more modern way of life. Zekir is also at a crossroads, as he is getting too old to spend such an amount of time up in the mountains with the sheep, while he also misses his favourite dog, Belichka, who is being held by a shady breeder.

The filmmaker is less interested in telling a story here (the mid-length is more structured to serve this purpose) than she is in observing the relations between the brothers, and those between them and the breathtaking nature that surrounds them. And in such isolation (some of the shooting locations are at an altitude of over 2,400 metres), where the only structure comes in the form of daily routines, the young men’s minds tend to go into overdrive. The occasional bouts of narration that Seliškar applies are both matter-of-fact and poetic, so they better succeed in painting a picture of the mental states, rather than in driving the story, which is also the filmmaker’s intention.

Technically, The Mountain Won’t Move is a maverick work. The filming took place over several weeks-long spans during a period of five years, and the locations are not exactly accessible, so the image- and sound-recording crews had to follow the subjects around during their mundane, repetitive work for days on end over the harsh terrain, taking care not to step into the others’ line of sight and not to disturb the harmony between the animals. The end result is nothing short of amazing on a sensory level. From cinematographer Brand Ferro’s point of view, we can see both the beauty and the danger of the place in bright, summery colours and crisp, digital visuals. This beauty and danger are further enhanced through Vladimir Rakić’s sound design, in which we can make out individual noises over the overall natural cacophony, while the austere use of Iztok Koren’s ethno-sounding music is also a nice touch.

For sure, there are parallels to be drawn with other documentaries about people in nature and people on the fringes of society, as Seliškar is not trying to redefine these sub-genres. However, The Mountain Won’t Move is a deeply personal work and a frank, in-depth observation of an endangered way of life.

A Film a Week - Cent'anni

 previously published on Cineuropa

Sometimes, a documentary filmmaker ends up with a completely different film than was originally planned or even imagined because we never know what reality might bring further down the line. For instance, this happened to Slovenian filmmaker Maja Doroteja Prelog and her debut feature-length documentary, Cent’anni. After the long process of shooting, editing and structuring it, as well as the world premiere that took place at Trieste earlier this year, Cent’anni enjoyed its international premiere in the documentary competition of the 30th Sarajevo Film Festival.

The film was originally envisioned as a triumphant, celebratory affair, just like the event it portrays: the filmmaker’s partner in life and art, Blaž Murn, embarks on his own Giro d’Italia-inspired cycling endeavour from the Dolomites in the north all the way down to Etna in the south in order to celebrate his all-clear from leukaemia and to serve as inspiration to the patients still fighting the disease. Along the way, however, it became a chronicle of their long relationship finally falling apart and them falling out of love with each other. For the filmmaker, from whose point of view we watch the events unfold, some figuring-out has to occur…

Before the fateful trip and project, their relationship seemed to be able to withstand every challenge, from abortion to his illness and her nursing him back to health, even though she is not really the type. The reason for this was Maja’s fascination with him and her determination to be the “cool” girlfriend who would not bother him too much. But the illness changed him into an ego-maniac who likes the sound of his voice so much that he speaks in long monologues, and maybe even into a narcissist who demands awe masked as respect – but is not able to give any to others. In “his” film, her role was one of technical support and a communicator between the star and the crew.

Maja Doroteja Prelog is pretty hands-on regarding her approach, given that, other than writing and directing the documentary, she also filmed most of the material herself, giving the camera to another cinematographer, Lav Predan Kowarski, Blaž or another crew member only when absolutely necessary. The cinematography itself is beautiful, thanks mainly to the choice of attractive locations that also have a foreboding, or at least slightly perilous, edge to them, but the focus also remains faithful to both Blaž’s heroic effort to complete his “race” and Maja’s to make a film in such conditions. Other technical components are stellar as well: Uroš Maksimović’s editing is precise, Sebastian Zawadzski’s music corresponds with the landscape of Maja’s state of mind and emotions, while Julij Zornik’s and Ricardo Spagnol’s sound design satisfyingly fills the sonic landscape.

Cent’anni is a rare personal and sincere film in which its filmmaker gives her all. It is also a highly subjective one, but rightfully so, since its topics are sensitive, and the director does not judge anyone apart from herself. Rarely do we see a person willing to expose her inner life to us to such an extent.

A Film a Week - Shooting Blanks / Poslednji heroj

 previously published on Cineuropa

Many “blanks”, metaphorical or not, are shot in the newest feature by Žiga Virc (of Houston, We Have a Problem! fame). There is an ongoing re-enactment of a World War II battle near a small Slovenian town, so lots of blank ammunition and pyrotechnics are involved there. There is also a subplot involving a young couple unable to have children. And there are a lot of empty threats in the conflict between one stubborn local and some foreign investors. So Shooting Blanks serves as a very appropriate title for this comedy formerly known as The Last Hero, which has just premiered at Festival of Slovenian Film.

Our protagonist France (Primož Pirnat) is a middle-aged man-child who dreams of the glory of the Yugoslav Partisans and their heroic resistance against the German occupiers. He never had a chance to prove himself in battle, but he collects all kinds of memorabilia, proudly wears a uniform, drives around the town in an antique jeep, and either visits big battle re-enactments abroad or organises small ones on the edge of town. Now he has a new mission: to drive out the German supermarket chain that wants to build a store on a field where a battle occurred.

Things are not easy on the home front either, as France is stuck between his foul-mouthed father Janez (veteran Bine Matoh), who is the last living Partisan hero in town, and his daughter Vida (Eva Jesenovec) and her boyfriend Toni (Jurij Drevenšek). Indeed, the two generations are locked in a battle of world-views. Toni and Vida are trying (but so far failing) to conceive a baby, while grandpa’s patriarchal comments and crude jokes do not help at all, and France fails to stand up to his father, which drives a wedge between him and his daughter. The sudden arrival of the company representative, a Greek woman called Christina (the always great Angeliki Papoulia), will stir things up further.

The first act of the film, which serves as its exposition, is the most successful one, especially on the comedic level. The jokes sound effortless and are well timed, so they usually land smoothly, and the snappy rhythm in Vladimir Gojun’s editing also helps. The tempo inevitably drops in the middle section and the jokes start feeling a tad forced, as though they’re serving didactic purposes, while, as the film goes on, sex talk starts dominating the comedy. The final section veers towards a domestic drama fuelled by certain family secrets, which stands as something of a tonal contrast with the rest of the movie.

The main trouble with the script written by Virc and Iza Strehar is the way it treats its characters. They are all archetypes, which might work for comedy – and they are all played accordingly by the Slovenian members of the cast – but a certain interplay and chemistry are lacking. The only exception is the character of Christina and the acting approach of Angeliki Papoulia, who can routinely infuse her characters with heartfelt emotion.

Otherwise, Virc has a knack for both mass scenes and comedic twists, which he previously demonstrated in his brilliant short Trieste Is Ours! (2009). Shooting Blanks seems a bit like an attempt to expand it to a feature-length format. The end result is a bit uneven on the level of the dramaturgy and delivery, but it feels visually polished (thanks to Fabris Šulin’s inspired camerawork), sure-handedly directed, and compact and densely packed enough to be generally entertaining while trying to deal with some serious aspects of life.

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 - Something Sweet / Nekaj sladkega

 previously published on Cineuropa

For a country with such a modest film output, quantitively speaking, Slovenia has a relatively long tradition of making independently produced films. Those movies might not always have been successful on the festival circuit or with international arthouse audiences, but they tend to fare better with a domestic crowd, attracting large numbers of viewers to movie theatres.

It might be significant that the director of the newest Slovenian indie crowd-pleasing comedy Something Sweet, Tin Vodopivec, started his film career as a production assistant on one of the most prominent Slovenian indies, Mitja Okorn’s Here and There (2004). In the meantime, Vodopivec has made a name for himself mostly as a stand-up comedian, so he teamed up with his partner, singer-songwriter and radio/TV presenter Urška Majdič, and assembled a cast of regionally well-known colleagues for his directorial feature debut. Having already racked up decent numbers domestically, it went into theatrical distribution abroad in neighbouring Croatia, with the potential to widen its reach to the whole region of the former Yugoslavia, and even countries all over the world with a significant Yugoslav diaspora.

The film opens with a parallel montage of a TV show host in North Macedonia making an introduction for and announcing his guest, the internationally acclaimed marketing guru Ace Majstorovski, and Ace (Macedonian-Slovenian actor and stand-up comedian Saško Kocev) himself having sex with a fan backstage. In the next scene, we meet another protagonist, a Ljubljana-based freelance event organiser called Kaja (Bosnian-Macedonian actress Jelena Jovanova), who sleeps in her car. Her ticket out of poverty is the event she is currently handling: Ace’s master class in one of the finest hotels in Ljubljana.

With Ace being late and even missing his plane, and Kaja sending goofy driver Neša (Serbian stand-up comedian Nikola Silić) to pick him up and drive him from Skopje to Ljubljana, she still has to improvise in order to keep her boss (Oriana Girotto) happy and her suspicious colleague/rival (Ula Furlan) at bay. When she notices that a hotel bartender, Gogi (also played by Kocev, this time with glasses and unkempt hair), is the spitting image of Ace, she gets the idea of making Gogi pose as Ace until the real guru shows up. With mess-ups on the road for one part of the gang and mess-ups with the flawed event organisation for the other, viewers will be treated to a few laughs and even a hint of romance blossoming between Kaja and Gogi.

The premise of deliberately mistaken identities is fairly standard for a screwball comedy, and Vodopivec tries his best not to mess it up. When he trusts his cast in front of the camera and lets them improvise, as well as the crew behind it, he does a decent job. The trouble arises when he decides to intervene with more attitude than actual experience in such things. Some examples of this are when he instructs editor Miha Šubic to employ some abrupt, quasi-jump cuts to ramp up the tension or use prolonged screen blackouts to highlight the significance of certain moments, or when he lets the score written by co-writer and composer Majdič and Leon First play in endless loops as a backdrop. The biggest problem, however, is the scriptwriting, with Vodopivec and Majdič sticking to the basics of shorter, TV-friendly scenes, relying too heavily on sketch logic and verbal and physical gags, while trying to connect them all in a semi-meaningful narrative necessary for a feature film. On top of that, not every joke lands properly, and some fail miserably.

Nevertheless, the breeziness of the picture as a whole and the presence of comedians from all over the region, as well as the naturalistic treatment of the differences in language and senses of humour, should please audiences from Slovenia to North Macedonia. After all, Vodopivec made the film for them, and they might as well see it as something sweet.

A Film a Week - The Man Without Guilt

 previously published on Cineuropa

According to the text at the end of Ivan Gergolet’s feature debut, The Man Without Guilt, 125 million people are exposed to asbestos in their workplaces, and the complications arising from this exposure claim around 100,000 victims a year, while the dangerous material is still in a grey area, legally. The film premiered in Tallinn Black Nights’ First Feature Competition, which could prove to be a good springboard for bookings at smaller festivals during the winter and spring, while distribution, at least in the co-production countries of Slovenia, Italy and Croatia, is to be expected.

The Man Without Guilt might be dedicated to all of the workers who have fallen victim to asbestos and their families, but the toxic substance itself serves merely as a trigger for a tense thriller-drama constructed around some other different dilemmas. After the opening sequence, which is actually a nightmare in which the word “dust” in Slovenian is sung in the fashion of an early Renaissance church canon, we meet out protagonist, Angela (Valentina Carnelutti, especially prolific this year), a caregiver in a Trieste hospital. She is a widow, as her husband Andrea died as a result of asbestos exposure, and he was not the only one among his work crew to suffer such a fate – his friend Sandro, the husband of Angela’s best friend Elena (Rossana Mortara), is next on the list. Both Elena and Angela blame their former boss, an entrepreneur in the field of construction named Francesco Gorian (Slovenian actor Branko Završan), for their loss.

When Angela learns that Gorian has suffered a stroke and ended up in her hospital, she goes to visit him. There, she meets his son Enrico (Enrico Inserra), who, unaware of the history between the families, admires her professionalism and offers her work taking care of Francesco at their home. She is reluctant to accept at first, but when she finally does, she finds herself facing the dilemma of whether or not to exact revenge – and if so, how?

The Man Without Guilt might be a feature debut, but it is actually a mature work: a film by a mature auteur (Gergolet has several shorts, some documentaries and a lot of industry films under his belt, both in Slovenia and in Italy) and a mature person. The way he intertwines complicated personal histories with equally toxic national ones is simply masterful, which is also the case with the use of the Slovenian language, which appears only during key moments of immense emotional tension. His smart writing is matched by his equally deft directing, with a strong sense of visual style that combines elements such as Debora Vrizzi’s thorough camerawork, Marco Juratovec’s production design and Natalie Cristiani’s measured editing into a smooth ensemble and a logical whole. The soundscape of the film is used to maximise the emotional effect, and both Luka Ciut’s modern-classical score and Julij Zornik’s sound design serve this purpose quite well.

The casting, acting and directing of the actors are also high points of the film, with Branko Završan’s effort being the most impressive. He also has one of the most difficult acting tasks: to channel a sense of menace without speaking in any language and with very limited physical options, but also to make said menace quite human and low-key, and the actor excels at this. The other cast members are also compelling in showing the nuanced emotions and detailed motivations of their imperfect, but very human, life-like characters. The Man Without Guilt might be a tad too calculated for a movie that deals with human emotions, but it is an astonishingly mature and well-executed debut.

A Film a Week - Wake Me / Zbudi me

 previously published on Cineuropa

Can anyone truly be reformed? Does life ever offer a chance at a clean slate? Can a person really get rid of their heavy hate-filled baggage? These are the questions to be aware of before watching the latest film by Croatian-Slovenian filmmaker Marko Šantić, Wake Me, which has just premiered in the new Critics’ Picks section of Tallinn’s Black Nights Film Festival.

We meet our protagonist Rok (Jure Henigman) in the hospital from which he’s about to be released. He wound up there due to some kind of accident, which resulted in head trauma and severe selective memory loss. He doesn’t even remember his girlfriend Rina (Živa Selan) or their life together in the touristic town of Bled, so he insists that she leave him at his mother’s house in the neighbouring industrial town of Jesenice.

His mother (Nataša Barbara Grančer), who is recovering from cancer, is far from happy to see her son, and we sense that her reaction is justified: Rok’s countenance is imposing, and his use of direct imperatives threatening. He comes across as someone who’s capable of aggression, if not outright violence. But his younger brother Jure (Timon Šturbej) still idolizes him, and his old gang led by Damjan (Jurij Drevenšek) are more than happy to see him back.

It's this gang who teach Rok a thing or two about his dark past, namely that the gang targeted the Bosnian Muslims who still lived in the town once known for its steel mill, and that he was the main “heavy” who was quick to get his hands dirty. Re-acquainted with these facts, Rok tries to make amends with the people he wronged in the past, such as his mother and his former school friends Selim (Blaž Setnikar), Đenana (Tamara Avguštin) and Amir (Benjamin Krnetić), who now lead the town’s Bosnian Cultural Centre, and he also tries to remove his brother from his friends’ toxic influence. But can people really trust that he has changed and that this is how he genuinely feels, if he can’t even remember his own girlfriend?

Wake Me might seem a somewhat lighter riff on American History X, but relations between Slovenians and immigrants from other parts of former Yugoslavia is actually a hugely popular theme in Slovenian cinema and public discourse. Co-written by Šantić and Sara Hribar, but first and foremost by Goran Vojnović who has explored this subject through various mediums (as a filmmaker, novelist, playwright and a columnist), this movie feels genuine, and the reason for this is its treatment of the main character, played by Henigman in an all-in fashion, not to mention the film’s locations and social landscapes.

The remainder of the cast play variations on their usual roles, but Šantić capitalises on this in efficient, economic fashion. Timon Šturbej is compelling as a kid brother who becomes overly impressed by his brother’s gang and their ideology, while Jurij Drevenšek is suitably creepy as a low-level ideologist and the leader of a gang of nationalist thugs. Ivan Zadro’s hand-held camerawork and the cold, bluish-grey colours he lends to the film’s exteriors add to its realism, Vladimir Gojun’s editing is smooth, and the finely balanced use of droning music, also consisting of piano and strings, and composed by Jan Vysocky, contributes to the film’s dynamism. Šantić also executes one key scene near the end of the movie with proper bravura, which is all that’s required for Wake Me to leave a good impression and perhaps rouse people from the reigning nationalist madness.

A Film a Week - Grandpa Goes South / Dedek gre na jug

 previously published on Cineuropa

More than 30 years ago, Vinci Vogue Anžlovar debuted with the film Grandma Goes South (1991), a relatively mellow comedy about an elderly lady escaping her nursing home, picking up two jazz musicians and driving off southward in a Mercedes-Benz convertible to start a new life. However, the film was a milestone of sorts simply by virtue of being the first film released in Slovenia since the country’s independence from Yugoslavia, and it became a smash hit domestically. Anžlovar is now back with his newest feature deliberately titled Grandpa Goes South.

Caution should be advised here because this is by no means a sequel and actually has little to do with Anžlovar’s debut, though it does feature elderly people (in this case, two of them) going in the same general direction in a motor vehicle (this time, it is a motorhome) against the backdrop of jazz music (here mixed with Balkans Gypsy tunes). Mixing the tropes of the broad comedy, the road movie and the gangster flick, it is actually closer tone-wise to the early noughties revival within Slovenian cinema of light 1980s Yugoslav comedy, as seen in Damjan Kozole’s Porno Film (2000), Branko Đurić’s Cheese and Jam (2003) and Marko Naberšnik’s Rooster’s Breakfast (2007).

Anžlovar opens his film with three plots following three pairs of characters. Troubled jazz musician Vlado (thesp Vlado Novák) abducts his best friend and ex band-mate Boris (Boris Cavazza, recently glimpsed in Sanremo and Once Were Humans) from the hospital with the mission to take him to his long-lost love Neda who lives in Serbia. After a fight, Esma (Zala Đurić, a rising star of Slovenian cinema) joins her boyfriend Peter (Timon Šturbej) on his job driving Miki (Maruša Majer) and Esad (Nenad Tokalić), a couple of assassins, on their mission, not knowing that they are about to serve as scapegoats. After somehow running away in the car, Esma and Peter get into a car accident which leaves him dead and her injured, and she is saved by Boris and Vlado. Through Esma’s connection to Romani travellers, the trio continues their run with them, with the brass music festival in Guča, Serbia as their final destination.

Judging by the response on the festival circuit (the film premiered with little fanfare at CinEast in Luxembourg and its domestic festival premiere at the Festival of Slovenian Film resulted in one Vesna Award for Best Supporting Actor awarded to Jonas Žnidaršič, playing the inspector who joins the chase later on), Grandpa Goes South stands a better chance with wider audiences in regular distribution, especially in the Balkans region. Its blend of humour relying on the stereotypes of silly old men, magical and wise Roma people and gangsters from the Balkans might prove to be too politically insensitive for Central- and Western Europe. The actors are clearly the trump card, with Novák and Cavazza having substantial chemistry playing their usual screen personas of a vagabond and a smooth operator, respectively. Đurić provides some youthful energy to complement them and Majer is clearly having a lot of fun playing the philosophically-inclined assassin.

However, the film suffers from the “sprinter’s logic”, starting in a high tempo that is bound to fall half-way through and not rise until the end. Moreover, the cinematography by Miloš Srdić is a tad too postcard-worthy, the music score by Milko Lazar and Anžlovar himself is a little overbearing in its omnipresence, and there is a bit of imbalance regarding the build-up to and the punchline of the jokes. This is especially obvious during the elaborately constructed sequence in an underground auto-shop that seems lifted from Emir Kusturica’s comedies, and is operated by Goran Navojec’s Burduš (named after the titular character from a Yugoslav film from the 1980s), who looks like a riff on Danny Trejo’s work in the films of Robert Rodriguez.

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.

A Film a Week - Sarajevo Safari

 previously published on Cineuropa

Thirty years after the beginning of the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and 27 years after it officially ended, it might seem that there is no topic, no matter how “fringe” or niche, left uncovered from that period of time. However, as it turns out, some of them are under-explored, to put it mildly. One of these is certainly a very particular bloody “activity” practised by some people with considerable financial and other means – a “safari” of sorts, but with targets and “trophies” of a different kind. Unearthing and exploring it, both in the factual and in a psychological and even philosophical sense, is the mission of Miran Zupanič and his documentary Sarajevo Safari, which has world-premiered at the fifth AJB DOC Film Festival in Sarajevo.

Zupanič opens his 75-minute documentary with seemingly idyllic footage of a spot on the hills overlooking the city, but the solemn music featuring a piano and a choir sets the foreboding mood. Archive footage of life in the city under the 1992-1995 siege follows in order to confirm the sense of impending doom. Then the narrator, shot from behind and in the shadows, starts telling his story about the “safari” and his connection to it as a witness.

The secretive, anonymous narrator had some military education in 1980s Yugoslavia and made a living in the intelligence sector before the collapse of the country. Out of work, he was approached by an equally secretive US agency with a lucrative job offer to travel to different parts of the collapsing country on a press accreditation and to “listen to the pulse of its people and peoples”. Through his contacts in Belgrade, he was informed about a “safari”: the “hunters” indulging in this activity were shooting at people in the encircled city from the sniper positions of the Serbian forces, for a price. The “safari” was organised and facilitated by the armies of both Serbia and Republika Srpska, and the participants came from abroad to assuage their morbid cravings.

Other than his narrator, he relies heavily on the archival footage of “normalised” city life from 1993-94, obtained by Božo Zadravec and the film’s producer, Franci Zajc, who, at the time, were war reporters. Zupanič also includes three sets of interviewees: a couple who lost their one-year-old daughter to a sniper shot; a former military intelligence officer and analyst, who corroborates the narrator’s story with his own findings obtained from a captured enemy soldier who witnessed one of the hunters being transported; and another victim of sniper fire, Faruk Šabanović, from the iconic archival footage of a man being shot near the Land Museum and then loaded into a UN armoured ambulance. While the officer’s account serves to cement the truthfulness of the narrator’s story, the couple’s testimony is used to compound the emotional effect of the loss they suffered, and Šabanović’s propels the story towards its more psychological and philosophical aspects.

The clarity and the “no nonsense” attitude of Zupanič’s approach is to be admired, but there are certain problems on both the narrative and the construction levels. Firstly, the narrator is the type of character that might speak the truth, but never the whole truth and certainly not nothing but the truth. Secondly, the archive footage tends to get a tad repetitive and is not really illustrative in regard to the narration it accompanies. Finally, the interviewees’ testimonies tend to get too long and to break the editing rhythm that Zupanič had established previously. But nevertheless, Sarajevo Safari has no problem striking the intended emotional chord.

A Film a Week - Riders / Jezdeca

 previously published on Cineuropa

Dennis Hopper’s classic Easy Rider (1968) is never mentioned by its name, but is referred to several times as “The Movie” and certainly serves as a source of inspiration for Dominik Mencej’s debut feature Riders. This smooth sub-genre blend of a road- and coming-of-age movie may never get as brutal in its exposure of the hostile environment and petty human emotions as Hopper’s film, but it definitely has something to say about growing up and being repressed by life events and a small environment.

Riders premiered in the Features Competition at the Sarajevo Film Festival, which might serve as a fitting springboard for a film with such tone. Further festival bookings and regional distribution in arthouse theatres could be expected in the foreseeable future.

Tomaž (EFP shooting star Timon Šturbej) and Anton (Petja Labović) are best friends and “entry-level” bikers, driving around on their mopeds through their village in the northeastern part of Slovenia. While Tomaž has the reputation of the good boy and hard worker who repairs machinery in his small shop in the village, Anton is more of a bad boy, constantly getting in trouble with authority figures in his home and at work. Both of them grew up fatherless: Tomaž’s father died, which left the young lad under the constant look of his mother’s (Nataša Matjašec Rošker) vigilant eye, and Anton never had one.

It is the spring of 1999, and the guys decide to modify their bikes into choppers and to take a weekend trip to Ljubljana to visit Anton’s girlfriend Tina. The surprise visit does not turn out to be a good idea, but along the way they pick up runaway nun Ana (Anja Novak) and meet with the old, wise biker Peter (Serbian star actor Nikola Kojo in yet another bravura performance, this time in a really subdued mode). So the duo grows into a quartet (alas, on three bikes only), and the weekend trip to Ljubljana gets prolonged first to an extended weekend towards the coast, and then to a longer trip all the way to Split in Croatia and maybe even to Međugorje, which in Yugoslav countries has the status of a Marian sanctuary and a miraculous place.

For Tomaž, the trip represents an opportunity for first love and also a stage of life in which he won’t be dominated by his mother or his best friend, while for Anton it serves as a chance to understand his anger and deal with it accordingly. For all three young ones, it is an attempt at freedom.

Riders is a very detailed and polished piece of cinematic work in almost every aspect. Samo Jurca’s measured sound design respectfully adds the engine rumbles and natural noises throughout. The visuals captured by cinematographer Janez “Zu” Stucin, edited in a rhythmic succession by Andrej Nagode and Matic Drakulić, are stunning, bathing in the casually brought out details of a certain time and place thanks to the production design of Iva Rodić and the costume design of Katarina Zaninović.

The fine details can also be spotted in Mencej’s and Boris Grgurović’s script (the impending solar eclipse, the end of the century, the fear of the “Millennium Bug” in one paranoid miniature executed by late actor Peter Musevski playing a truck driver in his last screen role), and also in the different dialects all the actors are coached to speak. Strictly on the level of acting craft, Riders also shines, thanks to the natural, spontaneous chemistry between the young members of the cast and the acting authority Kojo provides playing a wise man on a motorcycle. This is a ride to be taken and felt with both heart and mind.

A Film a Week - Disappearance / Verschwinden / Izginjanje

 previously published on Cineuropa

Before World War I, Slovenian was the native language of approximately 90% of the population in the valleys of Southern Carinthia, while today, the number is in the single digits. That is the starting point for Andrina Mračnikar’s documentary Disappearance, which premiered at the Diagonale, where it also won the Audience Award.

Mračnikar, who hails from the ranks of the Carinthian Slovene minority, dealt with the topic previously in her early works, such as the short documentary Andri 1924-1944 (2003), which was actually a mix of an essay dealing with a family secret and a portrait of her great-uncle, Carinthian partisan Andri Mračnikar, as well as her mid-length documentary The Carinthians Speak German (2006). Language, history and heritage are also the principal, but not the only, topics she touches on in Disappearance.

The history of Carinthia is marked by various events on the fringes of large-scale conflicts. After World War I, a plebiscite was held in certain parts of Southern Carinthia, where the people living there had to decide whether they wanted to live in the newly formed Republic of Austria or in the similarly newly formed Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (which would later become the Kingdom of Yugoslavia), and they voted 60:40 in favour of staying in Austria. During World War II, the Austrians and Slovenians once again found themselves on different sides of the battle: the Slovenian population was largely deported to the labour and concentration camps by the Austrian and German Nazis, while those who remained largely joined the Slovenian (and Yugoslav) partisans. After the war, the territory remained under Austrian jurisdiction. The country was obliged to grant cultural autonomy to the minority, as was stated in the treaty of 1955, but the pressure from the German-speaking majority continued to be applied, sometimes even escalating to the level of unrest, which was the case with the Ortstafelsturm event in 1972, in which the town signs in Slovenian were knocked over in an act of vandalism and the local population harassed.

For her film, Mračnikar uses interviews with her family members, neighbours and other Slovenian speakers from the area, as well as prominent political figures, such as lawyer Rudi Vouk and politician Valentin Inzko, adding her own thoughts and musings in the voice-over narration and even excerpts from her two earlier documentaries into the mix, packaging everything together in a documentary essay, of sorts.

The trouble with Disappearance is that Mračnikar fails to establish a clear structure, often losing the thread in the number of issues identified and in her repetitions of the same points, so the “essay” label serves more as an excuse for a disjointed film. On the technical side, the main problem lies within the editing, handled by Gerhard Daurer, visible especially in his repeated use of the short stretches of blacked-out screen during the interviews with the filmmaker’s relatives. This is aimed at building up the tension, but it seems artificial, given that they basically come back to the same events over and over again. In the end, the running time, clocking in at 99 minutes, feels tiresome, and another cut (maybe to a mid-length TV format) could possibly fix these issues with Disappearance in the future.

A Film a Week - Bitch, a Derogatory Term for a Woman / Prasica, slabšalni izraz za žensko

 previously published on Cineuropa

In social sciences, many theories have already emerged about millennials: who they (generally) are, what they (generally) want and how they (generally) live, many of these put forward by the members of the millennial generation themselves. Several of these theories are based on a claim that the current generation of young people has fewer opportunities and more distractions than previous ones, so they need more time to figure life out and find their own, authentic voice. Cinema-wise, millennials have found their artistic voice at a different pace depending on the national and cultural context. For film enthusiasts among Slovenian millennials, the landslide victory of Tijana Zinajić’s Bitch, a Derogatory Term for a Woman at the 24^th Festival of Slovenian Film might be good news, since it could be described as a snappy, sometimes manic millennial dramedy.

Our protagonist, Eva (Liza Marijina, of Half-Sister fame), is not at a great place in her life: she drinks, smokes and curses a lot, and occasionally does drugs. She struggles to find the motivation to do her job at a book shop specialising in chick lit and to find inspiration as a fledgling painter. Her best friend and flatmate Nina (Anuša Kodelja) is about to carry out her threats to emigrate to Berlin, which has been on the cards for years. Her other best friend and flatmate, whom she is secretly in love with, small-time pot dealer, couch philosopher and art critic Blaž (Tosja Flaker Berce), is in an on-again-off-again relationship with Mateja (Lea Cok), whom the rest of the gang find stupid. Eva is also stuck in a relationship with the mentor of her painting group, Jakob (Jure Henigman, deliciously sleazy), who is married. She and her flatmates are about to be evicted from their flat by the owner owing to unpaid rent, and on top of that, her period is late for apparently no reason. Can she ever move on from the point she seems to be stuck at?

In her free-flowing script, Iza Strehar tries to paint the confusion in the life of a (stereo)typical millennial, while she also aims for laughs by plucking particular situations straight out of sitcoms and inserting the B-word into the lines of dialogue as a swear word. Not all of the jokes feel organic or land that well, but they keep things moving. For her part, Tijana Zinajić does her best to sport music-video aesthetics by employing some striking production and costume design by Neža Zinajić and Matic Hrovat, respectively. The director does not even shy away from steering the film completely into music-video territory on some occasions, but the intended contrasts with the darker parts do not work that well, so the need for a “relaxation” of this kind is questionable.

The film’s best asset is definitely Liza Marijina’s performance. She demonstrates some good acting instincts, especially when she is tasked with turning up the emotional register from 0 to 100, and also shows some skills in in her interplay with the other cast members, boosting the energy and the mutual chemistry on screen. One could say she goes all-in, but she does so in a smart way.

However, the skills demonstrated in her acting are considerably higher than the risks that scriptwriter Strehar and director Zinajić take in their work, which in the end makes Bitch, a Derogatory Term for a Woman feel like yet another film about supposedly smart people doing stupid things because they feel stuck in life. But in a Slovenian context, this movie aimed at young-ish audiences still feels refreshing.

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.

A Film a Week - Once Were Humans / Nekoč so bili ljudje

 previously published on Cineuropa

Goran Vojnović is a Slovenian filmmaker and writer working in cinema, on stage, and as a novelist and newspaper columnist. The common theme in his work is the relationship between the different ethnic groups living in Slovenia in so-called interesting times. In his latest film, Once Were Humans, which has just premiered in the Festival of Slovenian Film in Portorož, he steps further into the territory of the thriller, against the backdrop of the refugee crisis.

Leo (Francesco Borchi, who starred in Vojnović’s debut film of 2010 Pirano), his ex-wife Tanja (Maruša Majer of Janez Burger’s Ivan fame) and his friend Vučko (Moamer Kasumović, whose credits include Pirano and The Frog) own a restaurant somewhere in the Alps, in the border area between Slovenia, Austria and Italy. Business is slow, there are issues with credit lines, and they begin to despair when their private lender Sandi (the remarkable figure of Slovenian stage and screen, Vlado Novak) shows signs of wanting to pursue his legal options and take the restaurant over. Leo then strikes a not-so-legal deal with his mob-tied acquaintance Gianni (Italian actor Gianluca Gobbi, mainly active on TV) to steal his truck back for some cash. Subsequently, he and Vučko set off on their “mission” to Italy. They steal the truck alright, but in a very sloppy fashion and, to make matters worse, it’s the wrong truck. However, the real cause for concern is the truck’s load: a group of African refugees who are probably victims of human trafficking.

Leo and Vučko will turn to different, shady people they know, who might be able to help them “deal with” the load, while Tanja tries to shelter her and Leo’s son Luka from his father’s wheeling and dealing. But time is running out, pressure is mounting, decisions need to be made by these characters caught up in a serious moral dilemma, and many lives and futures are at stake.

Written by Vojnović, alongside Italian screenwriter and director Tommaso Santi, who has several shorts and a couple of documentaries under his belt, the story demonstrates a strong sense of economy, successfully tying up the many threads of this complex tale, involving detailed protagonists, in under 90 minutes’ running time. But it also suffers from weaknesses, especially in terms of the supporting characters, whose only purpose seems to be to serve this particular story. As a result, the talents of Novak, Boris Cavazza, who plays the Austrian brothel owner Martin, and Emir Hadžihafizbegović, who plays the Bosnian-Slovenian chop-shop owner Senad, are pretty much wasted on bit roles that last only for a scene or two.

The functionality of the script is matched by Vojnović’s directorial approach. His style is functional, simple, but also somewhat textbook and almost never outside of the box. Miloš Srdić’s cinematography is used to highlight the attractive mountain locations and the contrast between this scenery and the industrial architecture of the nearby towns and highways. Editing, handled by Ivor Ivezić, is tight, while the soundtrack by Tamara Obrovac sometimes strikes too obvious a chord, whether on acoustic guitar or on synths for the more thriller-esque scenes. Overall, Once Were Humans is a decent, well-acted, tonally balanced and humane film with solid production value, but there’s a little something lacking to help it reach a higher class.

A Film a Week - Inventory / Inventura

 previously published on Cineuropa

Why would someone be shot at for apparently no reason? This mystery serves as the trigger for a string of events in Inventory, the feature-length fiction debut by Slovenian filmmaker Darko Sinko, who made a name for himself with the mid-length documentaries This Is Where I Live (2011), Revolt (2013) and Little Houses (2015). Inventory has just premiered in the New Directors competition at the San Sebastián Film Festival.

Really, there is no reason for Boris Robič (Radoš Bolčina), a middle-aged technical assistant at a university, to be shot at from afar while he is relaxing in his flat after a hard day’s work. He is a remarkably ordinary man living in an ordinary apartment and holding down an ordinary job. His marriage to Alenka (Mirel Knez) is respectful, but not exactly passionate. Their son Mitja (Žan Koprivnik) has moved away and started his own family. Boris has few close friends and no known enemies. He does not hold any grudges against anyone and does not even remember if he has crossed anyone in his life.

These facts make the investigation of the case, handled by seasoned police investigator Andrej (Dejan Spasić, glimpsed in Damjan Kozole’s Slovenian Girl and Nightlife, as well as Darko Štante’s Consequences), difficult: after finding no clues, the inspector puts it down to pure coincidence. Boris, on the other hand, does not feel safe and feels the urge to get to the bottom of things. Firstly, nobody from his circle of friends and family believes him when he says he was shot at for no reason. And secondly, he needs to make some sense out of the whole thing, so he starts looking into the events on his own.

His amateur investigation actually resembles something akin to undertaking an inventory of his life, re-examining his relationships and friendships, and finding strange coincidences. He remembers a life-insurance policy inhis name that he had forgotten about, which makes his wife and son (who has set his sights on Boris’s apartment) viable suspects. On the other hand, there is another man with the same name, a younger, private business owner who has an affair, which would make him the real target of the attack…

The premise of the film would make for a killer short, but in a feature-length format, it gets slightly too watered down, especially in the middle section. Nevertheless, Sinko’s movie is not so much about the investigation, but rather, it focuses more on the metaphorical personal inventory and the quest to make sense out of sometimes unpleasant and even dangerous coincidences. The casting of Radoš Bolčina in the role of Boris is spot-on: he is primarily a stage actor and is more than capable of highlighting the more remarkable aspects of Boris’s ordinariness, but without over-acting. Bolčina carries the whole film on his shoulders, and when paired with the other actors of different sensibilities and backgrounds (Knez, as his primary partner, also comes from the ranks of stage performance, while Spasić, with whom he has the meatiest exchanges, has more movie experience), it seems smooth and almost effortless.

Apart from his knack for working with the actors, Sinko also demonstrates a strong sense of aesthetics, employing mostly static shots with a certain symmetry in order to highlight Boris’s “squareness”, and painting the picture in a predominantly cold, but also bright, palette of colours, consisting mainly of whites and light greys captured by DoP Marko Brdar. The sound scheme is quite interesting thanks to Julij Zornik’s sound design, while the tonal shifts in the musical score by Matija Krečič are sometimes too on-the-nose. All of this combines to make Inventory a sure-handed and stylish fiction debut.