08/11/2022 - Montenegro’s Ivan Bakrač reveals subtle but very real promise in his first feature film about five childhood friends on the verge of adulthood

"When I’m struggling, my friend doesn’t say ‘I love you’. He’s too embarrassed, I know that. So he listens to me. I know that he’s looking and listening to me. I know that he understands." This extract from a poem by Chantal Abraham, slipped into an innocuous sequence set in a primary school classroom within Ivan Bakrač’s After the Winter [+see also:
trailer
interview: Ivan Bakrač
film profile], would perfectly sum up the Montenegrin filmmaker’s first feature, especially when added to the extract from Louis Malle’s The Fire Within, which is introduced just as surreptitiously (on TV, off camera): "I can’t move my hands forward, I can’t touch things. And when I do touch things, I don’t feel anything". Because it’s in this nebulous, emotional in-between zone, in the toing and froing which separates the end of childhood from adult age, that we see five friends wavering, a group depicted with great finesse by the director in a film discovered in last year’s Karlovy Vary Festival and screened today in the 23rd Arras Film Festival’s Visions of the East section.

Jana (Ivona Kustudic), Marija (Ana Vuckovic), Mladen (Momcilo Otaševic), Danilo (Petar Buric) and Bubi (Maja Šuša) are children from the small Montenegrin town of Nikšić. Thick as thieves since forever, they’re now witless students, working small jobs as if to delay the leap forwards into the rest of their lives and to make the most of the complicit drunkenness of the post-adolescent period (music festivals, swimming, nights spent in clubs, etc.). There’s love, too, with the desire to commit or not commit, the ease experienced by some, and the difficulties experienced by others, the heartbreaks and the surprises… But there’s also their families (and their secrets from the past, namely the leaden weight of omerta, inherited from the Balkan Wars 25 years earlier) and the patriarchal traditions which our group have distanced themselves from, because the two boys are now sharing an apartment in Belgrade, with Bubi also living in Serbia, in Novi Sad, while Jana and Marija are cohabiting in the seaside Montenegrin town of Kotor where they work odd jobs. The group Facetime one another, keep each other up to date, tease one another, needle one another, make shared plans, go back to their birth town together (by way of shortcuts), give one another space or help them in times of need.

The filmmaker explores this friendship over three time-periods (spanning a year, more or less), first focusing on the girls (Jana and Marija), then the boys (Mladen and Danilo), and then the boys and girls together (Mladen and Danilo alongside Jana and Marija, and then Bubi alongside Mladen, before the five friends all reunite in Nikšić). It’s an existentialist dance which the film depicts with great accuracy, painting a portrait of a generation in which each of the protagonists develops a real identity, in a great variety of settings (the second section akin to a road movie) and atmospheres. But After the Winter primarily unveils a very subtle director who spins his web (in pleasantly light fashion) little by little, discreetly and delicately, by way of superbly composed (yet wholly unostentatious) shots (Dusan Grubin heads up photography), bursting with suggestive detail. In short, Ivan Bakrač’s many elegantly and expertly concealed qualities make him a filmmaker to follow very closely.

After the Winter is produced by Montenegro’s Artikulacija and ABHO Film alongside Serbia’s Biberche Productions Akcija Produkcija, Croatia’s Maxima film and French firm Arizona Films Productions (who are also steering international sales).

(Translated from French)