What Iva Recorded

After an oil field is discovered nearby the small Dalmatian town of Murvice, the local goverment wastes no time and throws all of the town's expenses towards building an oil tanker harbor. Urged by his wife, a local engineer named Slobodan Despot applies himself for the position of the chief engineer on the project, which her lover uses as an excuse to ruin Despot's reputation. Furious by this reputation and questioning all of his ideas, Despot decides to start an affair with a woman far younger than him.

A theater premiere of Timon of Athens ends with a rapturous applause from the audience, and Boris, the lead actor (Boris Buzančić), is congratulated for having played the role of his lifetime. Encouraged by the sense of his own worth, he starts a romantic affair with a prompter, spurring gossip in the theater. The ensemble embarks on a tour, but as their performances achieve more success, Boris is becoming less liked among his colleagues, and he begins to experience the fate of the character he is playing...

Božidarka Frajt (playing herself) is an actress who is unsuccessfully looking for a job in Zagreb. The film follows her everyday life: she spends time with her friends and colleagues, shoots a television commercial, goes to a party, remembers her difficult childhood as a war orphan, and contemplates her professional and personal failures. Finally, she visits theatre manager Vjeran Zuppa in his office and asks for a job.

Wartorn Croatia, 1991. Seven-year-old Jerko lives a relatively peaceful life in a small village. However, when the ethnic conflicts reach his doorstep, he's forced to quickly grow up. His grandmother is viciously gunned down, his uncle mortally wounded, their family home is torn to shreds and his parents are taken by the Serbian forces as POWs. Hiding away in a wicker basket, he finds his way to an orphanage, but finds that shock had now rendered him speechless. Whilst being situated there, he establishes a growing connection with Bernarda, a psychiatrist who grows a liking for him.

A big family reunion at the weekend cottage around traditional food preparation "kotlovina" (pig on a spit and lots of drinking) with quaintly amusing and earnest situations revealing what is stronger: ties of blood and background or culture and the way of living.

Miroslav, the owner of a failing copy store, decides to get rich, starting up a delivery firm for party alcohol supplies. Things seem to be going well until his partner, a music store owner named Frog, fixes him up with a continous supply chain ran by a con man named Šušnjar.

It is nighttime. In Croatia, a young woman cannot sleep because her baby keeps crying. Her mother-in-law is also being kept awake by the baby's crying and she is not shy about offering unwanted child-rearing advice to her daughter-in-law. In Spain, a young husband and wife are also wide awake in the dead of night: they are in the middle of a turbulent argument. She is Spanish, he is Croatian and their marriage is in crisis because they simply do not understand one another. Back in Croatia, the young man's elderly mother is also awake, plagued with indigestion pains. The old woman is also worried about her lodger, a young Spanish girl who happens to be the sister of the old woman's daughter-in-law in Spain. The young girl comes home with her new lover. He is a taxi driver who drifts aimlessly through the night while his own wife endures a sleepless night with a crying baby and a nagging mother-in-law.

A young pianist joins the partisans because he decides not to play for the Germans before the scheduled concert. By taking a random path, guided by his conscience, he was initially accused of being a spy. The young pianist will feel a certain uneasiness among the partisans all the time, thinking that the task of the moment is only a direct struggle with the enemy.

By using the motifs of Krleza's play "Adam and Eve", written in 1922, director Tomislav Radic questions a similar pattern of male-female relations in a trivial, contemporary context. With Krleza's lines, Radic counterpoints almost documentary sequences from life, showing how Krleza's youthful distaste for the bourgeois concept of "love" can be actualized in a fundamentally different social environment.

After fourteen years, the married couple meets their old friend who lives in Australia for the first time, but the memories and emotions that this meeting evokes, however, fail to bring about a significant change in their monotonous everyday life.