By Tamar Noort. Landscapes fly past the viewer, glowing in a warm light. It’s summer, an old pick-up truck bombs down a country road. Six passengers inside the car, one of them still a child, and a crate of beer – they’re on their way into a nice evening. “Could it please always be like this?”, one of the girls asks, when they have settled down on a cosy meadow and heat up the barbecue grill.

This is a central question in Dalibor Matanic’s film – because even as the youngsters cling to the here and now, the movie is steeped in a sense of fugaciousness, history, and transciense. The idyllic landscape is disrupted by memorials made out of clinker bricks. The ruins look beautiful in the evening light – as if a landscape architect had errected stone walls with the occasional holes in them to accomplish the best combination of nature and architecture possible. But actually these are remainders of a war – these walls carry the weight of twenty years of Croatian history within them.

The young people in Dalibor Matanic’s film interact so naturally with their surroundings, as if ruins grew like grass or trees. They are oblivious to the fact that it is a privilege to be able to live for the moment, with no yesterday and no tomorrow. In the film’s prologue, Matanic foreshadows his fundamental theme: He shows a young couple during afternoon sex, immersed in each other, one with another. An old woman walks in on them, sits down on the bed without any hint of embarrasment in the light of the two naked people, and calmly tells her granddaughter the story how back in the days a soldier asked her if she wanted him to rape her. Abruptly the past comes crashing into the life of the young woman who up until now had lived only for the present.

Croatian filmmaker Dalibor Matanic has shot mainly documentary features during his early years. And as much he enjoys telling a story – he still mainly is a meticulous observer. Matanic tells us about a generation that holds the future of the young Croatian state in their hands; but this post-war generation will not be able to enjoy the future as light-heartedly as it may seem at first. They will have to lose their innocence first – and find out about their past.

Links

• PARTY (HR 2009. Dalibor Matanic)
• Film Is My Call – An interview with Dalibor Matanic
• Six Films per Year – Franziska Schuster about the Croatian film market