A 34-year-old, aspiring Serbian filmmaker who is shooting commercial advertising jobs to get by and is expecting a baby with his wife is at the centre of Nikola Lezaic’s introspective, meandering drama How Come It’s All Green Out Here?, which screens in the In Focus section at the Sarajevo Film Festival on the heels of its world premiere at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival this summer.
The tension between his creative ambitions and monetary realities, and the huge changes bound to be on the horizon as he becomes a father for the first time, have already pushed Nikola into a mood of self-reflection, when he embarks on a trip to Dalmatia in Croatia with his father, Mirko (Izudin Bajrovic) to reinter the remains of his grandmother, who had been buried in Serbia after fleeing her village in 1990s wartime. This sparks a quiet, internal reevaluation of his place in the family and his vivid but unreliable memories.
Nikola is played by an actor (Filip Djuric), but the character’s name and circumstances make it no secret that he is an autobiographical stand-in of sorts for the director. It could be that utilising a thin veil of fictionalisation has left Lezaic too close to the aspects of life he is depicting, because modest understatement can at points relax into a meandering drift that, leaving us outside the father-to-be’s innermost thoughts, feels unfocused and inconsequential. Nevertheless, there are enough moments of subtle beauty and humour to make a charming and poignant diversion of this tender ramble through the mountain landscape of Croatia. It’s where the German spaghetti western Treasure of the Silver Lake was shot in the 1960s, a production the family discuss in the car, adding another layer of history, and it is stark, rainy and lensed for moody drama, a world away from more widely familiar beach tourism images.
How Come It’s All Green Out Here? is the sophomore feature for Lezaic, who won the Heart of Sarajevo Award for Best Film in 2010 for his debut, a skateboarder drama that used non-professionals to also blur the lines between reality and fiction, Tilva Ros. How Comes It’s All Green culminates with shaky home movie footage from a time gone by, solidifying that this is ultimately a film about the inseparability of our formative years from the present, even if perception is always deceptive, and stories about the self often part fantasy or invention. Nikola has a vivid recollection of watching “The Twilight Zone” series as a kid in their old house — but a relative swears there was no television there. Small moments like this (a car accident passed on the road at night haunts like a real show episode) leave us to draw our own associations, but hint at the universe’s irreducible mystery and a persistent uncertainty that may be rooted in family trauma. Some houses in the region destroyed in the ‘90s were simply left that way after and never rebuilt. A sense of lives abruptly abandoned adds to the sense of nostalgia and ruptured fabric of continuity. But the prevailing mood, between more confounding moments of disquiet, is one of good-humoured banter, and the comical skepticism that defines the gap between the generations. Nikola puts masking tape over the logo on his sweatshirt each day (although he works in advertising, he’s uneasy with commercialism), a small gesture of activism that is met with his father’s bemusement.
It’s technically illegal to move their grandmother’s grave, but nobody is going to stop them, the family reasons. Nikola, struck by emotion and in a sudden outburst of tears, takes snapshots at the graveside of the family gathered in the cemetery. Improvisational license with the pains and devotions of existence, and the related feelings which can creep up unawares, is the spirit that drives this quiet, episodic melange, which is heartfelt but frustratingly hard to pin down in its random detours and glanced-over fancies.
Director, Screenwriter: Nikola Lezaic
Producer: Marija Lero
Cinematographer: Aleksandar Pavlovic
Editor: Jan Klemsche
Cast: Filip Duric, Izudin Bajrovic, Stojan Matavulj, Snjezana Sinovcic Siskov, Leon Lucev, Rada Mrksic, Dobrila Stojnic, Dorde Ercevic, Milica Gojkovic, Branka Katic
Production companies: Qce, Nukleus Film, PremierStudio, Forgrade
Sales: Qce
Venue: Sarajevo (In Focus)
In Serbian
114 minutes
