The winner of the KRZYSZTOF KIESLOWSKI AWARD for Best Feature Film at the 27th Starz Denver International Film Festival (shared with Laila Pakalnina's "Python"). The Balkan conflict and its legacy continue to be reflected in Croatian cinema. A success with both audiences and critics, Zrinko Ogresta's new film makes no attempt to find heroes or apportion blame. Beginning with the story of a mentally disabled man in a village recently devastated by civil war, his fourth feature consists of six loosely linked portraits of characters from contemporary life (they also include a young female drug addict, a lonely retired man, who is deluded into accepting a young female neighbour's offer of a date, a television actor who has become an alcoholic, and two soldiers unable to integrate and marked by trauma).The stories present situations in which the characters find themselves at odds with an apparently normal world, living essentially private lives and unable to establish relationships. There is a no narrative resolution although the film ends with the ironic use of the national anthem before the camera retreats through a tunnel similar to that with which the film begins. The war frames and inflects a sympathetic and humane portrait of everyday life that recognises that all generations may be permanently marked.
