Picnic

On the 1991 European Basketball Championship an incredible event occured. A team of some of the greatest Balkan basketball stars accepted gold and watched the flag of their country be lifted up. The flag of a country that no longer existed.

A young American is trying to find a man from her past, but he is never to be found, during the largest conflict on European soil since World War II – the battle of Vukovar. It is a search of identity and truth at a place where truth is selective, elusive, and even feared. A quest for faith, connection, and redemption simmers beneath the search.

The story of Jasna, a Croatian ex-pat who, due to her mother Anka's declining health, is forced to return to a place she has been avoiding most of her life - her home. The two haven't been in touch for years, but the proximity of death forces them to confront the ghosts of their past. It is also a portrait of life in a typical small town in the midst of Mediterranean hinterland. Plunging into the anxieties of the community, MATER subtly uncovers class, status, and gender issues that shape Anka's and Jasna's personalities - their stubbornness, strength, and tragic flaws.

“Jimmie” is told through the eyes of a 4-year old boy who has to go on a journey with his father to a safer land, leaving his mother at home in Sweden.

Sanela, a Montenegrin of Muslim background who left the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s after her father was kidnapped and killed alongside other Muslims, comes back to the Balkans after twenty years abroad. She has betrayed her origins, erased her own culture, and become a true Westerner. They say the past is a foreign land and that the one who departs and the one who returns are not the same person.

Mr. & Mrs. Lovett live out their (sex) lives in full public view in front of a permanently connected webcam, which frames their spartan living room like a human aquarium. This is all we see of their lives - but it's not so little after all. The young couple are driven business people, and they flirt, strip and screw for the benefit of the camera and the customers on the receiving end. The Croatian filmmaker Igor Bezinovic has created a surreal and funny take on a piece of avant-garde 'adult entertainment' from one of the internet's seedy corners. But he also documents a performance culture, which dissolves the boundaries between the private and public spheres and a parallel economy of images. A hedonistic and thoroughly commercialised culture, where supply and demand have taken on an entirely new and absurd meaning.

Anica (60) resists her ongoing chemotherapy while perceiving her daughter’s care as an assault on her dignity. Vlatko (60) is an alcoholic and a loner, completely written off by his work colleagues. Filled with mutual contempt, Anica and Vlatko separated long ago and seemingly no longer communicate. On their drawn-out paths toward oblivion, they search for an ally who will hear their desperate cry for the will to live.

These five award-winning coming of age short films offer a glimpse of how boys and young men tackle life's difficult desires: confronting one's demons, understanding sexual relationships, gaining the respect of one's father, or simply running away from it all. This is only the start of their complex formative years, where not every question has an answer, and not every answer makes sense. The short films are: Boys [Pojkarna] (2015); Ioana (2015); Kiem Holijanda (2017); Picnic [Piknik] (2015); Tomer & Elias [Tomer en Elias] (2016).

The rise and fall of Yugoslavian filmmaker Dušan Vukotić - the only Yugoslav Oscar-winner and one of the founding members of the Zagreb School of Animation - uncannily mirrors the tragic fate of his multiethnic country.