Fourteen years after his first film, the Sarajevo winner Tilva Roš [+leggi anche:
trailer
scheda film], Serbian director Nikola Ležaić returns with How Come It’s All Green Out Here?. A formal flipside to his debut, in which non-professionals played themselves in a fictional narrative, the new film is an autobiographical account in which actors play real people and re-enact real events. The feature has just world-premiered in Karlovy Vary’s Proxima Competition.

Ležaić puts himself at the centre of the story, as the director Nikola, played by Filip Djurić (Enough for Now [+leggi anche:
recensione
scheda film]). It opens with a shoot for a TV ad, where this film’s DoP, Aleksandar Pavlovic, also serves as the cinematographer. This comical opening, concerning a Bulgarian actor and a moping kid, reveals that Nikola is stuck in this advertising world and is waiting for a chance to make a new feature. Also, his wife is pregnant, and he has bought a van that he plans to convert into a camper.

But he has a more immediate matter to attend to: going to Dalmatia with his father (veteran Bosnian actor Izudin Bajrović) and an assorted company of relatives, to re-bury his grandmother who died in Serbia after escaping from her village during the Croatian war of the 1990s. Six people pack into two cars, one holding the metal casket containing grandma, and set off on the long trip.

But this is not a road movie; rather, it is a journey through the unreliability of memory and the solidity of identity. The last time Nikola visited his grandmother’s house was when he was nine years old, and he soon realises that most of his memories are a construct.

Ležaić builds his character through little details: obsessions like covering logos on his clothes with duct tape and constantly photographing things, including at the church service and burial. Djurić plays him as a good-hearted, likeable, slightly annoying and clumsy guy, whose idea of himself is challenged throughout the film.

There are no big events in the story – it is a succession of little developments in which other characters figure generally to a lesser degree, except for his father, which is a natural choice, especially bearing in mind the fact that Nikola is soon to become a dad, too. There is an ongoing exchange in which both learn more about each other, leading the viewer to consider questions of nature versus nurture and inherited traits.

The setting in Dalmatia will be surprising for most people. The region is usually associated with sun and beaches, but the film takes place in the rocky, unwelcoming, cold mountains that cut the coast off from the rest of the country. Pavlovic conveys this atmosphere through slightly muted colours and a somewhat darker image.

The feature works by accumulating little moments, rather than providing big discoveries. One scene at the cemetery is perhaps kind of a climax, except that it’s not played as such: what we perceive is so subtle that we can only imagine what might lie in the depths of Nikola’s psyche, an emotionally clever way for Ležaić to suggest more than needs to be expressed. After its unnecessarily extended beginning, the film becomes an easy and enjoyable watch, and most of its apparently vague points gestate and solidify in the viewer’s mind after it ends.

How Come It’s All Green Out Here? is a co-production between Serbia’s Qče and Forgrade, Croatia’s Nukleus Film and Bulgaria’s PremierStudio.