Ivan Ramljak

A poetic documentary about the lost film culture in the small villages on the Croatian islands during the SFR of Yugoslavia.

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

“Mezostajun” is an experimental documentary film, exploring spatiotemporal relations in a Mediterranean city in which the role of city’s public spaces in people’s lives varies greatly, depending on the season of the year. Elements of summer and winter are cinematically interlaced, and create in the viewers’ perception a new existential interspace called ‘’mezostajun’’.

In 1974 communist authorities built the so-called ‘Memorial Home for WWII Resistance Fighters and Youth of Yugoslavia’ in Kumrovec, a tiny rural hometown of the legendary president Marshal Tito. In 1991, when Yugoslavia collapsed 11 years after Tito’s death and the Croatian War of Independence started, the Memorial Home was closed, and it remained closed until today. Several attempts to repurpose the building have failed. Still, some fighters remain...

A naked middle-aged man walks out of the sea and starts climbing the steep rocks of a deserted island. He walks through an abandoned underground tunnel and descends to a large, empty sandy beach where his younger wife and 6-year old daughter are waiting. Their mutual inability to communicate is witnessed by an interested but troubled woman who is fishing from a boat anchored near the beach. When the tension erupts into violence, three members of the family will become two, and finally – in the open sea – only one person remains, caught in the trap of their own emotions.

In 1991, on the outskirts of Tenja, Josip Reihl Kir, the chief of the Osijek Police Department and a man dedicated to negotiations and avoding war, was assassinated. Told through the statements of a few witnesses and archive materials from the era, this is a story about the last few months of his life, in the dawn of the bloodthirsty Croatian-Serbian war, which Kir had been trying hard to prevent.

Hundreds of frozen and starved people floating on boats in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea fleeing from the war... Familiar scenes that we are used to seeing in recent times. But the year is 1944, and the refugees are travelling from Europe to Africa. After Italian capitulation,and before the arrival of German army, 28 000 Dalmatian Croats left their home villages and towns to live for two years under the tents in the middle of Egyptian desert, in a kind of a communist model village that was formed to show the Allies how the new Yugoslavia will look like when the war ends. This is a story about them.

This is a religious/kung-fu/love drama. The master of martial arts, Bore Lee from Sinj, arrives in Zagreb to learn yoga in order to relax more easily before his fights. He falls in love with the beautiful yoga instructor Anayoga, but at the same time gets on the wrong side of a vicious gang that terrorizes the owner of the club Mocvara, as well as other honest citizens of Zagreb. Bore has a choice – to join the evil gang and betray his ideals or put his and Ana’s life in danger while fighting crime.