Branko Ištvančić

Nine short films are connected into one whole, and they describe life in Croatia's capital of Zagreb.

The war has ended. Villages of Bosnian Croats have been destroyed, and they are living in the homes of the Croatian Serbs. An old man, a Bosnian Croat, disappears. A policeman Filip, himself living in a Serbian home, investigates the case uninterestedly. Through the relationship with his father, Filip tries to understand the motives of the missing old man. As the film moves towards the end, Filip’s investigation becomes more and more personal.

A young boy is found delirious and frostbitten on a bridge in a small village nearby the Croatian-Hungarian border, claiming that he's had a supernatural encounter with a creature from local folklore in the nearby swamp. This incident splits the community in two; the superstitious civilians and the rational police officers and hunters who believe that the so-called "Ghost of the Swamp" is actually a poacher responsible for the recent local shortage of deer population. Witht the adults trapped in a seemingly unending stalemate, two tourists from Zagreb, Miron and Melita, alongside their best friend Liptus, decide to investigate the claims of the supernatural on their own.

The main protagonist, Dara, lives with her husband, Rade Mitrović, in the vicinity of Obrovac, an area of typical Croatian rocky ground. They are the last authentic people of the area. He carves in the old-fashioned way, while she takes her flock of sheep and goats to graze in a pasture at the time when there is possibility of her flock being attacked by hungry wolves. She is very skilled in leading the flock, her dogs, in a special way. By the dog's behavior she knows that wolves are approaching and it enables her to save the flock, which is far from an easy task. This film follows the main protagonist's efforts to track down a lost sheep. She does this with careful investigation of all the relevant tracks of the lost sheep and despite sacrificing the time to do her household chores. This poetical documentary about eternal fight between good and wrong makes human existence uniquely miraculous.

Shocking, intimate and moving documentary "Sve je bio dobar san" ("It Was All Just a Good Dream: the Frenchman from Vukovar") examines the events from the time of the war in Croatia and the arrival of the young French volunteer Jean-Michel Nicolier in Croatia.

It depicts the daily lives of people whose job is to chase away cormorants that eat fish from a fish farm near Donji Miholjac, Croatia. Cormorants are protected by law and their nesting grounds are located across the border, in Hungary, which gives the protagonists’ efforts a Sisyphean, absurd.