02/04/2025 - In her first solo feature-length effort, Dalija Dozet opens her father’s archive of film material and constructs a very personal, yet thought-provoking, documentary

Dalija Dozet is an up-and-coming Croatian filmmaker who, so far, has stuck to the short format and has also collaborated on a series-of-shorts conceptual documentary called Eight Chapters [+see also:
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One might assume that her father, Danijel “Danko” Dozet, served at least as an inspiration for her seeking a filmmaking path. What’s more, we are about to learn that he was the one who presented her with her first camera as a gift. This jovial man, who seemingly never appeared in public without some form of camera on him, died pretty early, at the age of 55, leaving a certain emptiness in the life of his family: his wife Mirela, daughter Dalija and son Dino.

Danko also left a huge, unsorted collection of material filmed on very different formats, ranging from Super 8 to digital. His “schtick” was to simply film it, “archive” it and leave it behind, without any editing and without even coming back to watch the material. Dalija Dozet sets out on a journey to re-watch and sort through that huge home archive in order to maybe learn a thing or two about her dad. Because the act of filming meant two very different things for each of them: for him, it was a way to communicate with the world on his own terms; for her, a way to establish some sort of communication with him.

Dozet opens her film in an experimental fashion, with her father’s poetic letter printed out as a textual card over a blurry image and accompanied by an abstract score by Miro Manojlović. She will eventually go back to the same style to come full circle, but the majority of the film seems more “down to earth” and devoid of obvious manipulations in handling the archival material, while the music also becomes less abstract. This kind of shift certainly serves its purpose both for the filmmaker to get to know her father once again and for us to familiarise ourselves with Danko and his larger-than-life, cheerful personality.

The additional footage by Luka Matić blends in well with Danko’s “doodling on a tape” that occasionally shows a touch of genius. Dalija Dozet’s own narration serves as the perfect guide from a very personal point of view, while the script by the filmmaker and Beatrica Kurbel establishes quite a sensible structure that maintains its clarity in Sara Gregorić’s editing, which also prevents the “dense” film from becoming too heavy by keeping the running time just over the 60-minute mark.

The best thing about My Dad’s Lessons is the fact that it prompts thoughts on different topics beyond the father-daughter relationship portrayed. We might catch ourselves thinking about our own fathers who also “played” with cameras, sometimes even effortlessly converting to other formats, about the richness of our home archives that we rarely come back to, and even about the criteria dictating what qualifies as filmmaking or even videography. With this documentary, Dalija Dozet has probably surpassed even her own ambitions.

My Dad’s Lessons is a Croatian production staged by Hulahop.