Chronicle of a Crime
This is an omnibus consisting of three stories, all of which deal with deviations of the human psyche. In the story "Waltz", we learn about the first sexual experiences of a man who attends a dancing school in Split. In the story "Ave Maria", a cruel crime destroys a pastoral idyll, and in the story "Seas", we meet a family, living on an isolated island, that goes through an existential crisis ending in murder.
Lordan Zafranović
Director
Lordan Zafranović
Writer
Casts & Crew
Also Directed by Lordan Zafranović
The concept of the film "People (Passing) II" can best be described as an ultimate dynamic of visual and acoustic rhythm with a texture which consists of people passing, standing, sitting, laying, swinging, fukmed by static, mobile, at times intrusive, but always with a highly suggestive camera.
A group of young men rampage all day through the streets of an Adriatic port make love, wrangle over lunch, drink, finally steal a bus and is a burst of destructiveness drive it over the cliffs into the sea from which in surrealist fashion they are resurrected.
A lighthouse keeper lives on an isolated island together with his wife, ailing father and retarded sister. News of a serial killer stalking the isolated lighthouses makes him leave in order to hunt him down. In the meantime, the wife meets a mysterious and seductive stranger.
The setting is the islands off the Dalmatian coast of Yugoslavia, during WW II. The islands are controlled by occupying Italian forces, and a resistence movement of Communists is dedicated to sabotaging and ending the occupation. When a wealthy young man joins the resistence, he falls in love with a woman who turns out to be a spy for the Italians. As a result of his liaison and her activity, they are both executed by a Communist comrade - a previous friend. The comrade is dedicated to the hard-line policies of the resistence, until he himself falls in love with the daughter of a bourgeois landowner on the island - a landowner who has collaborated with the Italians. Neither the Italian occupying army (one officer is shown in an attempted rape scene) nor the resistence fighters are stereotyped forces for good or evil, but all are equally subject to the dehumanizing effects of war.
On a hot summer afternoon in a city courtyard, a young man amuses himself by aiming air guns at random targets. The film examines the roots and manifestations of Evil, which will become the director’s permanent concern.
Compressing one idle day in the life of a young artist by rotating the camera through his room, a sort of a self-portrait of Lordan Zafranović resembles a one-shot film, its grainy photography and moody music suggesting a meditative atmosphere characteristic for Split authors of his generation.
A comedy mocking the self-management system - the workers become owners of a luxury hotel on the Adriatic coast.
A short experimental 35mm film showing beggars, hobos and other misfits.
An epic documentary of rise and fall of Ustasha regime in Croatia.
Trials and tribulations of a Croatian communist intellectual in the turbulent years before, during and after the Second World War.
