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Take Me Somewhere Nice Dekanalog Reviewed for Shockya.com & BigAppleReviews.net linked from Rotten Tomatoes by: Harvey Karten Director: Ena Sendijarevic Writer: Ena Sendijarevic Cast: Sara Luna Zoric, Lazar Dragojevic, Ernad Prnjavorac, Sanja Buric Screened at: Critics’ link, NYC, 6/2/21 Opens: June 11, 2021 Maybe it’s a stretch to say this, but the road trip taken […]

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Close-Up is a feature that spotlights films now playing on Mubi. Ena Sendijarević's Take Me Somewhere Nice, which is receiving an exclusive global online premiere on Mubi, is showing from May 21 - June 20, 2020 in Mubi's Debuts series.When Dutch-Bosnian teenager Alma (Sara Luna Zoric) steps outside of the airport and for the first time in her life sets foot on the soil of her homeland, she’s not quite received with the fanfare she secretly anticipated. She came all the way from the Netherlands to Bosnia and Herzegovina to visit her hospitalized father, yet no one’s here to welcome her or even pick her up. Surely, this must be the place, but where to go from here? Fortunately, it only takes a phone call to reveal that Alma’s slacker cousin Emir (Ernad Prnjavorac) had reluctantly agreed to collect her from the airport, but fell asleep in his car...

A teenager travels from the Netherlands to Bosnia to meet her father for the first and last time in an amusing, diverting drama

The title, at once aimless and coyly, almost whimsically seductive, gives a partial sense of this film’s mood. It’s an elegantly made road movie in a style I can only call Euro-arthouse quirk. The director is 33-year-old Ena Sendijarević, making her feature debut with deadpan borrowings from Suleiman and Jarmusch. It is a dry, dark comedy that is clearly riffing on elements from her own background: like her lead character, Sendijarević was raised in the Netherlands, but born in Bosnia, which her parents fled during the 90s war. You are left wondering about the less quirky reality that must lie some way behind the story.

Alma (Sara Luna Zorić) is a teenager who lives in the Netherlands with her mum, but hears that her dad...

Ena Sendijarević's Take Me Somewhere Nice, which is receiving an exclusive global online premiere on Mubi, is showing from May 21 – June 20, 2019 in Mubi's Debuts series.“He’s the kind of person who thinks that nobody understands him, but I do,” the actor Ernad Prnjavorac responds when I ask him what to make of Emir, the character he’s playing. People have kept asking questions about him; they didn’t understand him when reading the script. I used Raskolnikov from Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment as an inspiration. Just like Raskolnikov, Emir is on a path of extremism and radicalization. I held on to the thought that probably the people commenting on Emir’s character wouldn’t understand Raskolnikov either. Luckily, my actor does. We are in the middle of shooting my debut feature film, Take Me Somewhere Nice. It’s end of summer and we are shooting in scorching hot Bosnia,...

Take a hefty amount of Jim Jarmusch, mix in a few heaping tablespoons of David Lynch, leaven it all with Bosnian absurdism and you can more or less envision “Take Me Somewhere Nice,” the stylishly quirky debut feature from Ena Sendijarević that won Rotterdam’s Special Jury Prize for exceptional artistic achievement. The film certainly looks good, thanks to the director’s eye for unusual Academy-ratio compositions and cinematographer Emo Weemhoff’s playful way of executing it onscreen, yet Sendijarević’s screenplay defiantly resists going anywhere, turning this off-kilter story of a Dutch-raised Bosnian teen returning to the motherland to visit her hospitalized father into a one-trick pony. Festivals will understandably consider this an audience pleaser, but Sendijarević likely has better, more mature films in her future.

Bright, candy-toned digital colors and a deadpan view of the world capture the desired emotional climate, which opens nicely with Alma (Sara Luna...

Standing tiny before a vaguely impressed crowd, fake snowflakes pouring down a semi-deserted hotel hall a few meters away from a stretch of the Bosnian coastline, a magician seeks a volunteer for the obligatory sawing a body in half trick. Begrudgingly, an insouciant look that belies an endless and soul-crushing journey behind her, Alma (Sara Luna Zorić) lends her teenage self to the experiment. The box is sealed; the magician taps around it; and a blade slices the silence with a metallic clang. Alma’s body is chopped in half, and the room erupts in an applause.

With its limbs protruding into the frame from unseen bodies — hands, feet, fingers sticking out as severed roots — Ena Sendijarević’s gorgeous debut feature Take Me Somewhere Nice is a tale of fractured identities, a Bildungsroman that zeroes in on a teenage girl traversing two irreconcilable worlds, each demanding her undivided allegiance, none...