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IFFR 2014

Self-exploration as an attempt to live Happily Ever After

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- Humorous but uncompromising, the film shows the director retracing her steps to former relationships all over Europe

Self-exploration as an attempt to live Happily Ever After

Croatian director Tatjana Božić's first feature-length film Happily Ever After [+see also:
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is a self-exploratory documentary about her search for love. Humorous but uncompromising, the film shows the director retracing her steps to former relationships and easily gets to the viewer as this is a theme everyone can relate to.

Starting off from a present boyfriend, the Dutch Rogier that she has a child with, and tracking back her ex-boyfriends in Moscow, Hamburg, Zagreb and London, Božić films her new encounters with the men she had been with as long as 18 years ago. Such is the case with the guy from Moscow, whom she lost to a woman also called Tatjana, and the two of them seem to have quite a friendly relation - as she does with some other women who were connected to the men before or after her.

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The film registers as a sort of odyssey (the Croatian title translates literally as Love Odyssey) through the past of Božić's love life. Like most of us, she was in search of "true love", but the film explores the question of what exactly is "true" in a romantic relationship. How far does the reality go for anybody in a romance – and what does constitute reality anyway, what are our expectations and how much do they diverge from the other side's ideas of how things should work.

Of course the director doesn't reach any definite answers, there are simply no easy solutions unless you take advice from her Russian female friend, an author of seven self-help books on romance, who gives out some of the funniest lines of the film. But perhaps Božić has inadvertently reached at least a part of the solution: her relationship with Rogier, which seemed all roses when it started, but is stuck in a sort of a dead-end now that they have a small kid, is still working. Rogier helps with the film, and the Netherlands offer all sorts of options for a separated couple with a child.

The fact that Božić was born in Croatia and speaks about boyfriends from around Europe offers some fitting cultural-clash references and infuses the film with a wider aspect, but not less important, than its main subject matter. This is a quite personal, and simultaneously very open film, which should be able to find room even outside the festival circuit with the right distributor.

Happily Ever After as co-produced by the Netherland's IKON and JwdV Film and Croatia's Factum.

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