There are persons, things, events that simply don't have luck. As any other forms of art, movies can be unlucky as well.
So many things were announcing that Stella could be a successful movie, for local level of course (movies from Yugoslavia got a lot of festival awards and critics' praises but apart from festivals never appeared in foreign theaters). Director Krelja was famous for his documentaries, co-writer Pavlicic is one of best modern Croatian novelist with several great movies made after his novels, music was written by Arsen Dedic, a great poet, songwriter and singer with career starting in late fifties and now in 2010's he is still an active star in Croatia, the story was a drama (with topic partially following Krelja's 1979 movie "Godisnja doba") with some elements of crime and just enough political criticism to be interesting and still safe from banning by still leading Yugoslav communist regime
And then the war happened.
People who were living in cellars, listening to sounds of air-raid and artillery, and a lot of them abandoning their homes (lucky ones going to relatives abroad or maybe less dangerous parts of country, less lucky ones to refugee centers), people who lost everything they had including very often some members of their family weren't interested in any movies at all. Even those who lived in rather peaceful regions spent several hours daily in shelters and their only reason to watch TV was to hear the news and the direction of enemy flights, to know when to expect next alert. Nobody cared for drama on TV, drama and tragedy could be seen through the windows and not rarely in their own homes (but they didn't survive to tell us about it).
And as it always happens, radio and TV presented only programs related to war. If it was movie, it was a war story or some other big drama or tragedy supposed to make people brave and ready for sacrifice. Stela had nothing of that. Even worse, it had several Serbian actors in cast. And for years that were coming no Serbian singer and no Serbian actor appeared on radio programs or TV screen in Croatia. Even those who opposed the war and Serbian government were banned because traumatized people could hardly distinguish them from the rest, and Serbian language in songs could be experienced as provocative.
Once the war was over Stela was forgotten. Croatia had too many fresh wounds, to many traumas, people with PTSD, war invalids... So many topics for new movies. Yugoslavian milicija from Stela was replaced by Croatian police and new audience didn't care for it any more, as well as for corrupted politicians or disillusioned communists, and now with so many homeless children, children whose parents were killed in war, Stela's destiny didn't seem so harsh as it was supposed to look back then in 1990.
Maybe now the war is enough far behind and Stela could try its luck once more. Maybe it's not the best thing that Pavlicic wrote (surely not like Ritam zlocina) but it is, for Croatian movie, a surprisingly coherent story with enough interesting characters both as main and supporting roles, that keeps the good, stable rhythm during most of its one and half hour, something that most Croatian movies don't even try to manage.
And, just one objection
even now, 20 years after war, IMDb still tries to convince us that this (and many other) Croatian movies from Yugoslavia years were made in Serbian language.
