Secret Ingredient

An omnibus of ten short films by ten young directors.

The film is a high-concept project with five stories exploring the themes of motherhood and pregnancy, directed by women filmmakers from five former Yugoslav republics. “Croatian Story” follows an anguished painter who must decide whether or not to keep one of her unborn twins, diagnosed with Down syndrome. “Serbian Story” finds an expectant mother in the same emergency room with a charming killer. “Bosnia-Herzegovina Story” centers on a financially strapped Sarajevo family whose son?s lover is pregnant. “Macedonian Story” unfolds in a clinic where a drug addict struggles to keep her baby, and “Slovenian Story” ends the omnibus on a humorous note with a nun who finds her own way to immaculate conception.

One dark night in the local cemetery, a gentle, wise boy, trying to prove to his elderly drunken neighbor that he is a man, receives his first lesson in the irony of life.

A landlady asks her tenant – a trumpeter who has an audition that day – seemingly innocent favor: to drop off her female friend and her little daughter in the city. The tenant is unwillingly involved in a series of dramatic events which fuel his creativity during the audition later that day.

The film follows life destinies of eight people with Macedonian and Croatian origin each living in the others’ country. The film analyzes the lives of mainly young individuals who have more or less fulfilled themselves in a socially, religiously and culturally different environment by opening the issues of identity, connection with the environment they come from, cultural and religious differences and the relation of society to the individual.