Writing
Following the river flowing through the centre of Sisak, the film creates a portrait of a former industrial city. The river today is a space for leisure and relaxation. However, when we examine the people that live and spend time there, the social conflicts of the transition break out onto the surface. The river reveals the remains of past that were left in the water.
Erna and Dževad are the owners of a pub in the vicinity of a steel mill, a complex that used to be one of the largest of its kind in Eastern Europe. Taking place one week before the pub’s official closedown, the film follows a series of conversations between visitors and frequent guests, who discuss the ways of reaching Germany – a new utopia of former socialist workers.
The apartment complex constructed for the workers of the Sisak Ironworks recieves a new image. After standing as a passionate symbol of workers' rights for several decades, it now becomes a home for Middle Eastern refugees, whilst the building's former inhabitants see no future in Croatia and decide to join their children in other European countries. As the years go by and natural and societal changes in the area bring forth new challenges, the building itself becomes a lively portrait of Croatia in the roaring 2020s.
While state authorities chase down supplies of increasingly rare Covid vaccinations, the queues of those waiting for them stretch endlessly along streets. Those queuing comprise a microcosm of the populace – a tapestry of personalities that range from stern gatekeepers to elderly women deliberating over vaccine preferences. As it moves from the bustling queues to the hushed interiors of vaccination centres, Pavilion 6 shifts from patients to the nurses and other members of staff.
In the native city of the film's author, crows have been breeding which residents treat as temporary and unwanted guests...
Zeljko is the labour union leader at Gredelj Train Factory. His deputy, Mladen, has committed suicide after massive public protests and inter-union clashes. Zeljko is torn between the guilt he feels over Mladen’s death and workers’ expectations that he will lead a strike that should thwart a plan by the government, acting on the EU’s behest, to declare the factory bankrupt. WHAT’S TO BE DONE? is structured in three acts. The first act uses observational documentary footage; the second, footage filmed a decade later; while the third is fiction.
The film is followed by Croatian anti-EU activist Marko Franišković who tried to run for the election in his radical political program. What is happening to him on this path is questioned by the proclaimed principle of parliamentary democracy. Documentary-judicial horror.
A "road movie" to the past: two buses, two journeys, two final destinations, two opposing ideologies. The first bus carrying "the victors" on their way to commemorate and celebrate Tito's birthday at his birthplace, the second transporting the elderly and "defeated", as well as some young idealists, to the place of the World War II massacre at Bleiburg. But to the filmmaker Goran Devic, an outsider and observer, it was much more than that: "I was struck by the dramatic and emotional "sameness" of what was going on around me."
Goran Dević conducts confessional interviews with three men who were actively involved in the conflict in former Yugoslavia.
War. A city under the siege. The truce has been recently signed, and the squad known as the 'Blacks', who used to do the dirty jobs, needs to be disbanded. Ivo, the squad commander who has lost three of his soldiers, prepares the action to retrieve their dead bodies from the forest and, despite the ceasefire, blow up the dam, thus causing a great damage to the enemy: The survived members of the squad, tortured by their personal doubts and guilt, move into action. On the battlefield, they find the enemy they are searching for is in the place they least expect - inside themselves.
Passive regions of Lika, Kosinja and neighboring villages every twenty years affect the flood caused by abundant rains and snow melting. The director is questioning whether a natural disaster can connect what the close war past separated?
A film that has the outer structure of the noir thriller, deals with a war crime committed in the center of the city, and actually portrays a community that will have to deal with what has been done in her name. War, night, female movie.
The film follows the tenants of a building in Sisak’s industrial suburb of Željezara during a period in which a large mural of a Croatian street artist appears on one side of the building. All the political changes the area has experienced have shaped the tenants of the building itself.
The film follows a rather peculiar workshop held in Zagreb for foreigners with deep pockets. The aim of the workshop is to teach participants a very basic skill – how to seduce a woman in order to get her to bed.
Two Furnaces for Udarnik Josip Trojko follows the disassembling of the famous Siemens-Martin furnace, which once stood at the heart of the huge Yugoslavian iron industry. As we watch the old making way for the new, we hear off-camera archive recordings of political speeches, full of enthusiasm and ideological optimism, from the period when the old furnace was in operation.
Like many other transitional countries, Croatia became rather conservative. In it’s own, funny way, this film is investigating the area of autoeroticism.
