Jure Pavlović
A young American is trying to find a man from her past, but he is never to be found, during the largest conflict on European soil since World War II – the battle of Vukovar. It is a search of identity and truth at a place where truth is selective, elusive, and even feared. A quest for faith, connection, and redemption simmers beneath the search.
These five award-winning coming of age short films offer a glimpse of how boys and young men tackle life's difficult desires: confronting one's demons, understanding sexual relationships, gaining the respect of one's father, or simply running away from it all. This is only the start of their complex formative years, where not every question has an answer, and not every answer makes sense.
The story of Jasna, a Croatian ex-pat who, due to her mother Anka's declining health, is forced to return to a place she has been avoiding most of her life - her home. The two haven't been in touch for years, but the proximity of death forces them to confront the ghosts of their past. It is also a portrait of life in a typical small town in the midst of Mediterranean hinterland. Plunging into the anxieties of the community, MATER subtly uncovers class, status, and gender issues that shape Anka's and Jasna's personalities - their stubbornness, strength, and tragic flaws.
Mr. & Mrs. Lovett live out their (sex) lives in full public view in front of a permanently connected webcam, which frames their spartan living room like a human aquarium. This is all we see of their lives - but it's not so little after all. The young couple are driven business people, and they flirt, strip and screw for the benefit of the camera and the customers on the receiving end. The Croatian filmmaker Igor Bezinovic has created a surreal and funny take on a piece of avant-garde 'adult entertainment' from one of the internet's seedy corners. But he also documents a performance culture, which dissolves the boundaries between the private and public spheres and a parallel economy of images. A hedonistic and thoroughly commercialised culture, where supply and demand have taken on an entirely new and absurd meaning.
Ismir is nervous. He has set off from Sarajevo to visit his father who is serving a sentence at a semi-open prison. A delay means that father and son now only have twenty minutes for their important encounter. It is hard to start a conversation. The pair sits next to each other awkwardly, trying to find the right words. They talk about what is new, about how school is going, and the boy listens to the war stories he has heard hundreds of times before from his Dad. None of this brings the pair any closer. But once they stop talking, they get up and start boxing each other. It is just for fun, really and perhaps for a bit of training. As they box, something begins to grow between father and son. And then, Ismir, who is much smaller than his strong father, succeeds in scoring a direct hit, one that really packs a punch and hurts for quite a while. And all at once, the ice is finally broken.
