Singularities of a young Croatian cinema
At the same time, the advent of an animated cinema that sought to free itself from the constraints of censorship, known as the Zagreb School, helped to establish Croatian distinctiveness. Its fame peaked in 1961 when Dušan Vukotić's Succédané won the Oscar in its category, something that had never happened to a non-American director. Vatroslav Mimica, whose career alternated between animated shorts and live-action features, was another of its most prominent representatives. However, the cinema of the 1950s was still strongly influenced by classicism, as in the films of Branko Bauer, whose most famous, Mon fils, ne te retourne pas (1956), depicts the difficult reunion of a partisan with his young son, indoctrinated by fascist ideology. Nikola Tanhofer's H-8 (1958) perhaps prefigures the modernist trend of the 1960s in its narrative bias - the viewer is warned at the start of the film as the protagonists of a traffic accident head towards their deaths. This corresponds to a certain relaxation of the federal system, with certain prerogatives being entrusted to local institutions that encourage experimentation. It's an amusing coincidence that Orson Welles was shooting his version of Kafka's The Trial (1962) in Zagreb, which fits in perfectly with this trend. Prometheus of the Island of Viševica (Vatroslav Mimica, 1964) revitalizes the already hackneyed theme of the partisan and the war, attempting to capture the way memories flood back to the main character when he returns to his native island. In the same vein, Zvonimir Berković's Rondo (1966), filmed in glossy black and white, as if inspired by the New Novel, uses chess as a symbol to show the muted war waged by the protagonists of this love triangle behind appearances and civility. Ante Babaja's Breza (1967), set in gloomy rural Croatia, still plagued by archaic customs and inhabited by characters the antithesis of Rondo's, displays a similar sophistication. This blessed era gradually came to an end at the end of the 1960s - we should also mention Une vie accidentelle (Ante Peterlić, 1969), which follows the idle daily lives of two young people in Zagreb. A new love triangle forms the backdrop for what remains one of Croatian cinema's most popular films to this day, Qui chante ne pense pas à mal (Krešo Golikse, 1970), a nostalgic evocation of 1930s Zagreb, bathed in folk songs, whose charm of yesteryear seems a long way off. The same year, in a film as harsh and dry as the Zagora in which it was shot(The Handcuffs), Krsto Papić recounts how the arrival of two Titist agents in charge of an arrest disrupts a wedding in a village near Vrlika. The story harkens back to events in 1948, but frighteningly foreshadows the internal strife that would set the Balkans ablaze a few years later. His next film, Hamlet's Representation in the Village (1972), is a lighter satire of the compromises of power. At the end of the decade, L'Occupation en vingt-six images (Lordan Zafranović, 1978) shows, not without a certain refinement, how the idyllic daily lives of three friends of different origins living in Dubrovnik are turned upside down by the war - and condenses the Ustasha exactions into a scene bordering on the unsustainable. At a time when the care given to productions seems to have largely waned, suffering from the fierce competition represented by television, Rajko Grlić's On n'aime qu'une seule fois (1982), the story of an impossible love, reminds us that Croatian cinema is still to be reckoned with. However, it would be a little over thirty years before a Croatian film was again selected for Cannes.
Croatian cinema and its ghosts
The 1980s were marked above all by the attempts of Croatian directors like Zoran Tadić to adapt American-inspired genre cinema to a Communist framework on the verge of collapse. The war that followed the dismantling of Yugoslavia obviously plunged Croatian cinema into crisis. In 1996, Comment la guerre a commencé sur mon île (Vinko Bresan, 1996), a hit with Croatians, took a darkly humorous approach to dealing with wounds that were still open. For a long time, Croatian cinema gave the impression of being irreparably traumatized by the war and the difficult transition from socialism to a democracy that was precarious in many respects. Against this backdrop, a new generation of filmmakers is gradually emerging. Fine Dead Girls (Dalibor Matanić, 2002) features a lesbian couple facing intolerance from their neighbors. A Wonderful Night in Split (Arsen Anton Ostojić, 2004) presents, with a willingly cynical sense of humor, an unprecedented image of the port city, dissipated, a little interloped, where a drug dealer and a rock concert are the only things that bring together three different narrative threads. Ostojić also distinguished himself with a film Halima's Way (2012) about the Serbo-Bosnian side of the conflict in Yugoslavia. Métastases (Branko Schmidt, 2009) is a kind of social chronicle about three Dinamo Zagreb fans, addicted to drugs, alcohol and hooliganism. Today, we are witnessing a revival of Balkan co-productions, a welcome sign of pacified relations, but it's not certain that cinema - quality cinema - is the winner at the moment. It's all the more difficult to draw conclusions as these films sometimes take a long time to reach us: for example, it took four years for Quiet People, un jour à Zagreb (2014) to be released in France. Novine or The Paper (2016) kept the Balkans on tenterhooks before becoming the first Slavic-language series bought by Netflix: the takeover of an independent newspaper in Rijeka by a mafia businessman serves as the starting point for a plunge into the arcana of Croatian politics. Ivan Salaj's The Eighth Commissioner (2015) tackles the same theme, but in a comic way, showing the moral conversion of a crooked politician, forced into exile on a remote island. It's the island of Vis that partly serves as the setting for Nevio Marasović's Comic Sans (2018), the embodiment of a young, hip cinema, whose typically contemporary anxieties are superimposed on those of the Balkans.
At the same time, the country is becoming an open-air studio, attracting blockbusters from all over the world, which seems to go hand in hand with the country's new-found fortune in tourism. Tours are now offered through the natural sites, historic centers and monuments that may have been used as backdrops for the Games of Thrones series: Dubrovnik plays the role of King's Landing. It was also here that the final season of Borgia was filmed. The Adriatic, its beaches and blue waters, its geographical proximity and low costs also logically attract productions from all over Europe, such as the recent Cousteau biopic L'Odyssée (Jérôme Salle, 2016). In En amont du fleuve (Marion Hänsel, 2017), one of the characters is called Homer, but his journey takes us inland, through the sublime gorges of Paklenica National Park. Another recently released European co-production, Chris the Swiss (Anja Kofmel, 2018), is noteworthy for its originality. In this animated film, the director investigates the death of her cousin, a Swiss journalist murdered in Croatia at the height of the war. In 2023, Andrej Korovljev's film Hotel Pula takes us back to 1995, when Bosnian refugees, carrying heavy traumas, try to rebuild their lives in the coastal city.
