11/07/2025 - The film tells the story of a Romanian woman obsessed with meeting her idol, a Serbian musician

Cendana Trifan, Miodrag Mladenović and Katia Pascariu in Sorella di Clausura

After her previous feature, Ivana the Terrible [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Ada Solomon
film profile], won the Special Jury Prize in Locarno’s Cineasti del Presente competition in 2019, Serbian-Romanian director Ivana Mladenović is going next-level with her latest film, Sorella di Clausura, which will be shown in the main competition of the Locarno Film Festival in August (see the news). The film is being produced by Ada Solomon through microFILM (Romania), and co-produced by Dunav 84 (Serbia), Nightswim (Italy) and Boogaloo Films (Spain).

The screenplay, written by Mladenović, Adrian Schiop and Momir Milošević, follows a 36-year-old woman facing financial issues, who thinks all of her troubles will disappear if she finally meets the Serbian superstar she has been in love with, from afar, since she was 12. Vera, one of the musician’s alleged mistresses, promises to help, but the endeavour will prove more difficult than expected. The story is set in 2008, when Romania was enjoying the positive effects of entering the European Union, but also when the financial crisis plunged the country into deep recession.

Sorella di Clausura received support from the Romanian National Film Center, Film Center Serbia, the Serbian Ministry of Culture, the Italian Ministry of Culture, the Institut Català de les Empreses Culturals and Eurimages. Marius Panduru – who also shot the other Romanian feature in Locarno’s main competition, Radu Jude’s Dracula (see the news) – is the DoP. The main characters are played by Katia Pascariu, Cendana Trifan, Miodrag Mladenović, Arnold Kelsch, Cătălin Dordea and Adrian Radu.

Given that Ivana Mladenović started her filmmaking career as a documentarian and stuck close to reality with her fiction features, where Adrian Schiop and herself played fictionalised versions of themselves in Soldiers. Story from Ferentari [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Dawid Ogrodnik
interview: Ivana Mladenovic
film profile] and Ivana the Terrible, respectively, we had to ask how close to reality Sorella di Clausura will remain. “This film is different. It found its own universe, one that sometimes feels like a farce. I wouldn’t call it a parody, but it definitely shows how improbable reality can be and how it is sometimes even more absurd than any fiction,” the director explained.

In a domestic film industry where there is a distinct imbalance between films with male and female protagonists, we asked Mladenović if her latest feature pushes for equilibrium. “Lately, women’s lives and struggles seem ignored, as if they don’t matter. Maybe it’s also because there’s this feeling that no one would even want to pay attention [to these issues]. I didn’t consciously think of this film as reclaiming that space, but yes, I think that’s what it does. It shows women's everyday struggles in society. It shows how they resist, no matter how radical that resistance might seem.” For full context, Romania has been shocked lately by a glut of cases of women being murdered by their current or former partners, which has led thousands to protest in the streets against a society that is ignoring femicides.

Sorella di Clausura is being handled internationally by French sales agent B Rated International.