One day, Luka arrives on the doorstep of his elderly mother. The trouble is that Luka disappeared 30 years earlier during the Croatian War of Independence, yet he is just as young and unharmed as the last time he was seen. Despite this, his mother takes him in while trying to suppress both the strangeness and the reality of the situation.

A deeply personal story about those who are lost and never return, Shallow Ground is both a tender exploration of love and loss and a raw exposé of the pain wrought by war. Directed by Croatian filmmaker Jozo Schmuch, who holds a Master’s in Film and TV Direction from the Academy of Dramatic Arts in Zagreb, the film has already screened at festivals including PÖFF Shorts, Sarajevo and Zagreb, where it won the Best Short Film Award. Cineuropa spoke to Schmuch as the film prepares to screen at Karlovy Vary within the EFP’s Future Frames.

Cineuropa: Your uncle is one of the missing people mentioned in the film. How did you go from his story to the one you tell in the film?
Jozo Schmuch: My mother wanted to name me Hrvoje, after my uncle, who went missing during the fall of Vukovar. My grandfather was against it, claiming it was an "unfortunate affair" to name a child after someone who had died. But my mother insisted that Hrvoje might not be dead, that there was still hope he was alive. This loss, this mourning for someone you can never be sure is dead has been part of my life since early childhood.

I see Shallow Ground more as a memorial to a family member I never met than as an exorcism of our sadness, which will always remain. I also felt the need to tell the story of Vukovar in a different, softer way. Vukovar, and films about the tragedy that took place there, are often used to promote far-right and nationalist ideas, and I feel a deep, intrinsic need to challenge this. The tragedy of Vukovar should never be used to sow hatred, but should instead serve as a lesson so that nothing like it ever happens again, anywhere in the world.

How did you find your two leads?
I had seen Rada Mrkšić in many films over the last few years. She is an experienced theatre actress from Osijek, a city close to Vukovar, and she is currently enjoying something of a film and television renaissance. I knew she could act; I just needed to find out whether she felt the same way about the part as I did. After reading the script, she called me and said she would very much like to be part of the film and that she would cut short her holiday so that we could prepare.

The casting of Luka, played by the brilliant young actor Luka Knez, was a little more unorthodox. Luka and I were in the same year at the Academy of Dramatic Art in Zagreb, and I knew he would be right for the part, but I was torn between him and another actor of a similar age. In the end, I asked my mother for advice, and mind you, my mum has no connection to film or the arts whatsoever. After seeing a photo and a few clips of Luka, she simply called me and said: "That's the guy! Take him! Don't question yourself too much!"

How important was it for you to keep an air of ambiguity, of the surreal, in your story?
Early in the writing process, I knew I wanted Luka not to be a ghost or a mirage, but a real person whom anyone in the film could see. I also knew I didn't want to explain how or why such a thing had happened – I wanted the audience to accept it head-on. And I didn't want Luka to arrive with some kind of divine wisdom; I wanted him to give his mother an ordinary day — just one ordinary day of the kind his disappearance had stolen from her. I think the ambiguity and surrealism grow out of those decisions: there is a clash between watching two people share an ordinary day and knowing that one of them may have been dead for a long time. As a director and screenwriter, I am very drawn to magical realism, unexplained phenomena, ambiguity and metaphysics.

What projects are you working on next?
I am in the early stages of writing a feature script (or two) with co-writer Josipa Križanac; preparing for the upcoming shoot of a short film titled Second Law of Thermodynamics, for which I've received funding; developing an idea for a TV show; and also developing a film titled Shadows together with Barbara Mattes, a Croatian-German screenwriter.