A Film a Week - Fantasy

 previously published on Cineuropa

Right from the opening shots of Fantasy, the feature debut by Slovenian musician and filmmaker Kukla, premiering in Locarno’s Filmmakers of the Present competition, the first association will become very apparent: French filmmaker Céline Sciamma and her earlier to mid-career works like Tomboy and Girlhood. It might not be a deliberate reference, but rather a product of the simple fact that coming of age takes longer than it used to and that it is never easy, especially for young women in a world structured to follow certain patriarchal traditions. The resemblance between the Parisian banlieu and the housing-estate buildings on the outskirts of Ljubljana does not go unnoticed either.

The story follows three “besties” in their early twenties who, at the start, all sport a uniform, tomboy attitude and speak the same local dialect that mixes Slovenian with other southern Slavic languages, but there are some differences between them to be observed. Sina (Mina Milovanović) is into sports, especially boxing, and wants to embark on a career as a coach. Jasna (Mia Skrbinac) is the most ambitious of the gang: she stays quiet and wants to keep the group together, but she also dreams of making something of her life elsewhere. Mihrije (Sarah Al Saleh) seems like the youngest one, and her primary goal is to avoid getting married to a man whom she does not know and who would be chosen by her parents. They are all of foreign ancestry and have to endure both the patriarchal rules of their neighbourhood and the low-key, systemic racism from Slovenian civil servants.

Their individual lives change once they meet a seemingly liberated, even slightly unhinged, transgender woman named Fantasy (Alina Juhart), to whom they all react differently. Mihrije falls for her hard – so hard that she even runs away from home to follow her on a trip to North Macedonia, where Fantasy has to introduce herself under her male given name, Filip. While the two are away, Sina falls for her married coach, Boris (Denis Porčič), and starts exploring her more feminine side, and Jasna decides to leave her passive-aggressive mother (Silvija Jovanović) behind and find work abroad. Can their friendship withstand such temptations?

Kukla’s screenwriting might seem classical, so a certain drop in tempo occurs in the second act, as expected, but she manages to accomplish the primary task she gave herself: she effectively implants us in the minds of young women on the brink of adulthood, creating a sense of empathy for the troubles her characters are dealing with, and she does so with style.

The slight movements in Lazar Bogdanović’s camerawork, paired with Lukas Miheljak’s rhythmic editing, Relja Čupić’s moody electronic score and Julij Zornik’s perfectly calibrated sound design, create a unique, dream-like atmosphere. Kukla’s directing style, especially when introducing lengthy sequences that resemble music videos of a peculiar genre (vocoder-heavy trap
mixed with “turbofolk” from the Balkans), might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but bearing her background in such music in mind, it’s to be expected that the filmmaker would also manage to capture the vibe of this world.

Kukla’s work with the largely non-professional actors is one of Fantasy’s strong points, as they dive deep into their characters and convey their every state and emotion compellingly and with conviction. This should not come as a surprise, since Kukla already “tested” them all in her award-winning short Sisters (2020). But with Fantasy, she manages to achieve a rare feat: to expand a short movie into an even more impressive feature.

A Film a Week - Block 5 / Igrišča ne damo!

 previously published on Cineuropa

Life is not easy for a new kid on the block. At a certain age, moving seems like a total reset: with a new neighbourhood also comes a new school and the obligation to make new friends and fall in with a crowd that has already been there and shares a certain, established dynamic. Having a cause in common (or creating one) might help, but it might also drive a deeper rift between the kids’ and the adults’ worlds. This is something that we see in the new film by versatile Slovenian filmmaker Klemen Dvornik, Block 5, which premiered at Locarno, in the Locarno Kids sidebar, and is now screening at Sarajevo, in its Children's Programme.

Our protagonist, preteen girl Alma (Kaja Zabert), has just moved into a flat in a housing block in Ljubljana with her father, Filip (Marko Mandić, seen recently in Sonja Prosenc’s Family Therapy and Hanna Slak’s Not a Word). Life seems hard for her, since the same gang of skateboarding kids bullies her at school as well as in the neighbourhood. Once she finds out that her father is handling the development project that will turn the block playground, complete with its skating park, into a car park, she reaches out to them, so they all overcome their differences and form a pact to put a stop to it. Alma has a deeper personal reason to take part in this environmental project, since her mother died on such a mission in the Amazon. The adventure, which resembles a war game between the kids and the adults, begins, and along the way, animosities will be turned into friendships and a sense of community will be forged.

Working from a script written by Croatian-born, Ljubljana- and Prague-educated writer-filmmaker Dora Šustić, Dvornik demonstrates his versatility and eye for detail. Although they both occasionally rely on clichés, they manage to capture the life of kids and adults in a complex neighbourhood that is ethnically mixed and has class divisions, much like most of the estates on the outskirts of Ljubljana. Dvornik also shows he has a decent knowledge of contemporary young-adult culture, as he insists on TikTok-style interludes of vertical videos of their skating shenanigans set against a background of contemporary trap-pop music.

The director also knows how to work with young actors and newcomers, when to give them directions and when to step back so they can create their own interplay in an organic way. It results in great chemistry between them, with Kaja Zabert and Kaja Šuštar (who plays Alma’s nemesis-turned-best friend Luna) being standouts, while the rest of the young cast also fare pretty well. The adult cast members, except for Marko Mandić, reliably good in his role, have bit parts, and some of them, such as Ivana Roščić (playing Luna’s mother), Enes Bešlagić (playing a local kebab parlour owner) and Gregor Zorc (playing an unemployed man who wants to stick it to the system and therefore shows the most empathy for the kids’ venture), imbue their characters with life, while Tihomir Stanić (who plays Filip’s boss, Brabec) nails the vibe of the main villain.

Shot observantly by Czech DoP David Hofmann, who captures the details that could easily have been neglected by a cinematographer more familiar with the setting, scored by David Herceg to highlight the emotion in a discreet way, and edited vibrantly by Ivana Fumić, Block 5 is a film that should find fertile ground with elementary-school children, while also keeping their parents’ and teachers’ thoughts occupied for 80 minutes.

A Film a Week - Role Model / Vzornik

 previously published on Cineuropa

Is starting afresh ever an option? Can we simply reset our lives? Is it up to us and only us, or does it actually depend on the environment? These are the questions that filmmaker Nejc Gazvoda (known for 2011’s A Trip and 2013’s Dual, as well as for collaborating on the script for Rok Biček’s award-winning Class Enemy) asks in his third fiction feature, Role Model, which premiered recently at the Festival of Slovenian Film, while its domestic distribution is scheduled for this autumn.

The recently divorced Maja (Mojca Funkl, glimpsed in Miroslav Mandić’s Sanremo and Matevž Luzar’s Orchestra) and her 15-year-old son Jan (newcomer France Mandić, the son of famous Slovenian actor Marko) come from Ljubljana to an unnamed small town on the Croatian border. It is spring in the pandemic year of 2021, and the schools are about to re-open after months of online teaching. Maja and Jan have to “go” to the same school, she as the psychologist and he as a final-year student, and it presents a challenge for both of them, especially after it becomes clear that they are not the types that fit in easily and that they had something of a posh life back in Ljubljana.

During her first week at work, Maja strikes up a rivalry with another newly appointed psychologist, Neja (Klara Kuk), over their differences in opinion on how to approach the problematic suicidal ninth-grader Jakob and his impulsive mother Marina (Marina Redžepović, of The Staffroom fame, in an impressive turn here). On the other hand, Jan, being the “new guy”, gets hazed and bullied by his class, especially when he unwittingly takes over the title of “Sunshine” from Jakob in an especially brutal “game”. Both mother and son meet people in the neighbourhood who may potentially offer them a chance to escape – for her, it is a slacker named Gregor (Matej Puc), who lives next door, and for him a mysterious, awkward, slightly older dude also named Jan (Jure Henigman), who fancies himself as a musician and martial artist. But as Maja succumbs more and more to alcohol, Jan thinks of ending things for good the only way he can think of…

Gazvoda establishes a beautiful and functional cinematic language early on, relying on static, usually long-distance shots in the cinematography of Jan Šuster, which suggest observation, and a foggy colour scheme that hints at the confusion of moving into a new environment. While the abundant use of classical music ramps up the tension, the script co-written by Gazvoda and Tomislav Zajec also offers some relief in the awkwardly humorous moments hinging on Maja’s nature as being stuck up and snobbish, and the neighbour Jan acting weird. Also, Gazvoda’s work with France Mandić is stellar, but it also shows that the latter is a natural-born actor capable even of micro-acting in his first role.

Unfortunately, Role Model loses momentum and breaks its own “rules”, directing-wise, as the script raises the stakes constantly and becomes more of a standard-issue film about bullying and the reaction to it – and it almost falls apart completely in the final section. While the filmmaker’s matter-of-fact attitude that teenagers can be cruel bastards (as is also the case with most of the adults) is quite refreshing, the influences of other, better films on the same topic are pretty transparent here. In the end, it seems that the helmer proverbially bit off more than he could chew, so he ended up being on the trail of something, but not quite catching up with it.

A Film a Week - Observing / Opazovanje

 previously published on Cineuropa

A couple of years ago, a live stream of the beating of a sole man by a group of people in the centre of Ljubljana went viral. Hundreds, if not thousands, of people saw it live and failed to react appropriately – for example, by calling the police. That real-life event served merely as the starting point for Janez Burger’s newest film, Observing, which has just world-premiered at the Festival of Slovenian Film, before heading to its international premiere in the Critics’ Picks section of Tallinn Black Nights.

Burger, who also co-wrote the script with late Serbian screenwriter Srđan Koljević, opens the film with a title sequence set against the audio of the vicious fight, before showing us our protagonist Lara (a newcomer to the feature-length format, Diana Kolenc), a young paramedic in a crew together with the experienced Joco (Vladimir Vlaškalić) and wise-cracking driver Rok (Benjamin Krnetić). Their break is cut short by a call for them to go and intervene. The subject is a man called Kristijan (Vito Weis), who has been viciously beaten and whom they take to hospital, where the medics put him into an induced coma.

As Lara gets more and more involved in the case, strange things begin to happen to her and the people around her. At first, she gets a message from the comatose man, which she passes on to his father, and this gets her in trouble with him. Then she starts getting updated versions of the beating video featuring observers who will soon end up dead themselves, after which she alerts the police, and then inspector Borut (Jure Henigman) gets involved. On top of that, the bin men are striking, the rubbish is piling up in bags around the bins, and rats start “visiting” both her car and her flat. But the real test for Lara begins when she sees her pregnant sister Ema (Nataša Keser) in one of the videos. Is she losing her mind, or is the world around her falling apart?

As is the case with most of Burger’s fiction films, here he also studies society, and its lack of empathy and humaneness. The question he wants to ask here is whether the act of observing a crime without doing anything (especially in a digitalised world) is in itself a crime, and what should be a just sentence for it. The choice of a seemingly innocent, professional and ethical character as the focal one is also a smart move, and so is the infusion of suspense in the narrative by showing more of the video upon each repetition, until finally revealing it in its entirety. The same goes for the directorial decisions to film in a narrow, 4:3 aspect ratio, which is further narrowed by the internal framing of the small, cramped spaces that our protagonist spends her time in, amplifying the sense of anxiety and fear both in her and in the audience. The novelty here is Burger’s toying with the ideas of genre cinema, lacing social drama with psychological thriller, suspense and horror.

Burger’s work with the actors is great, as expected. He basically launched the screen career of Maruša Majer in his previous films, and he is on the way to doing the same here with the brave and highly expressive Diana Kolenc. The technical components are also on a lofty level, with Marko Brdar’s persuasive cinematography, Miloš Kalusek’s resolute editing, and Julij Zornik’s and Igor Popovski’s sound design being among the standout elements. Observing is a strong piece of cinema that comments on the harshness of reality in a refined language, asking some important questions in the process.

A Film a Week - Body / Telo

 previously published on Cineuropa

Slovenian producer and documentarian Petra Seliškar does not shy away from expressing very personal thoughts and feelings in her work, from her feature-length debut (and her best-known work) Grandmas of Revolution (2006) on. She has a habit of sharing her own thoughts with her audiences, as well as exposing her family and circle of friends in her films. In her newest outing, Body, filmed over the course of 20 years, she deals with a friend she’s had since her adolescence, Urška Ristić, and her battle with autoimmune diseases. Body premiered in the Documentary Competition of Sarajevo, and further festival exposure should be expected.

Seliškar opens her doc with a sequence that radiates calm, wisdom and clarity. Urška, now in her forties, sits on a lakeside beach with her daughters Zoja and Mija, preparing to reflect on her life so far. As we learn from an excerpt of archival video material, Urška was a promising pianist who even competed internationally. We also learn that she led an interesting life, to say the least, in her twenties, spending some time in a psychiatric ward and having her first daughter quite early and out of wedlock. Zoja changed her for the better and made her more stable, repairing her complicated relationship with her own parents – but then the first disease struck.

After a delay in getting the proper diagnosis and appropriate treatment, Urška was left in a sorry state, having to learn to speak, walk, and recognise her family and loved ones again. Being a fighter by nature and enjoying a lot of support from her parents, daughter and Bojan, with whom she was in a relationship at the time, she gets better, starts playing again and attains happiness once more, with the icing on the cake this time being the birth of her second daughter. But a new disease starts to afflict her, and this time it’s even more insidious. Can she accept this change to her body and her mind, and come to accept and love herself again?

Seliškar covers this extended period of time and the wide spectrum of topics touched upon in Urška’s inspired and frank narration with an exceptional sense of style. The primary timeline, in which Urška and her daughters spend their time as a family on the lake, serves as the basic framework for the whole film and constitutes the starting point from which the narrator jumps to her memories and musings. Seliškar tends to capitalise on the optimal distance and point of view in Brand Ferro’s lively, summer-tinged camerawork in order to paint an emotional picture, while the length of the blackouts, slow fade-outs and fade-ins in the editing by Sashko Potter Micevski and Sandra Bastašić provides the necessary emphasis on what is important.

Seliškar is even more playful when she provides the visual background to Urška’s memories, thoughts, musings and even dreams, using a lot of archival and home material filmed ad hoc, but also some abstract imagery filmed through a microscope lens. The music, varying from punk rock to neoclassical and even experimental tracks composed by Vladimir Rakić, is also in perfect sync with the visuals, and complements this portrait of an extraordinary person and her battle. In the end, Body is a visually stunning and emotionally breathtaking piece of cinema.

A Film a Week - Beanie / Kapa

 previously published on Cineuropa

Wonders do happen around Christmas time in Ljubljana. They might not be something we wished for, exactly, but they still have the ability to surprise us. Santa exists, yet there is not only one, but rather a whole syndicate of them. A dog that falls into our laps as a gift from the heavens might not be the right breed or might only have three legs. And a thieving vending machine might dispense its sweets and also spit out all of the money it had stolen before.

At least this is the case in Beanie, the third feature by Slobodan Maksimović. The film is branded as the first Slovenian Christmas movie, and it has been touring the specialised festivals (and the specialised children’s programmes of the regular film festivals) since the spring. Its national premiere is scheduled for the Festival of Slovenian Film, which is now under way. Beanie has already been dubbed into several languages and will enter distribution in various territories, including its home country, in November, just in time for Christmas.

All Lučka (newcomer Kaja Podreberšek) wanted for Christmas was a baby sister and a puppy. All Erik (Gaj Črnič, also a newcomer), who is also called “Beanie”, for obvious reasons (he always has his beanie on), wanted was to spend the holidays with his parents. Instead, he won the lottery at the home for youths where he lives (and where he is bullied), and the prize was to spend Christmas Eve with Lučka’s family. Their last name is Božič, which means “Christmas” in Slovenian, and this is exactly the joke that the home’s headmistress, Ana (Mojca Fatur), tries to crack.

So, instead of getting the presents she so desired, Lučka has to spend a hygge-style Christmas with her posh, yet absent-minded, parents Barbara (Ajda Smrekar) and Boris (Croatian actor Frano Mašković), and this boy from the youth home who has the strange habit of wearing his beanie at all times. Her initial discontent does not evaporate so easily. When she wakes up in the middle of the night, thinking that she has seen Santa coming to her house, Erik follows her, first in an attempt to prevent her from doing something stupid, then to protect her, and eventually taking the lead in their shared adventure. Christmas Eve in Ljubljana can be scary, but also magical.

Engagingly written by Saša Eržen, well acted and cleverly directed, Beanie could be regarded as one of the best children’s Christmas movies. The concepts it deals with are simple, but they can also be refined, strike a deep emotional chord and tell a meaningful truth (for instance, that kids love their parents even if they are good-for-nothing drunks). Furthermore, the chemistry between the young actors is natural, while the more experienced thesps pull some simple, effective stunts, and the sense of directing, opting for predominantly wider shots to put an emphasis on the atmosphere, while adding emotional significance to the close-ups, is spot on.

Beanie’s technical qualities are also top-notch. Sven Pepeonik’s cinematography captures the touristy and the not-so-touristy Ljubljana in the holiday period, while Jurij Moškon’s editing is fairly seamless. Michal Novinski’s score, using a wide range of instruments and evoking a neoclassical and jazzy mood, follows the emotion of the film perfectly, and the animation and visual effects by Michal Struss are also a valuable addition to the movie.

In the end, kids will enjoy Beanie, while the parents accompanying them should also remain interested in it. One can only appreciate all the effort and the emotion that must have been invested in such a project.