There is irony to the title of Croatian director Bruno Ankovic’s feature debut Celebration, which had its world premiere in the Crystal Globe competition of the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival. The festivities it refers to are those held by the fascist Ustasha organisation when it briefly came to power in 1941, ruling the Independent State of Croatia as a puppet state of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy after the Axis powers invaded Yugoslavia. But this intense and disturbing drama, adapted from the novel of the same name by Damir Karakas, is anything but a glorification of fascism. Thick with ominous, brooding atmosphere, it is set in a Croatian village and the dark forest that surrounds it. We move back and forth in time between 1926 and 1945 as, in four episodes, the film shows how extreme impoverishment, systematic violence and desperation push a young man from a farming family to join the Ustasha forces.
Celebration begins in 1945, when Croatia’s wartime fascist state has already failed. Mijo (Bernard Tomic), who had been an Ustasha soldier, is hiding in the woods out in the open elements above his former home, fearing that the communist partisan forces who have been heard lurking around in the meadow below will shoot him in retaliation. His beloved wife Drenka (Klara Fiolic) pays him clandestine visits. She is building him a shelter by cover of night, but it is difficult to make progress on it with so many eyes around. Mijo grasps onto the hope that if he bides his time he can return to a simple farming life, his Ustasha ties forgotten, but guarded distrust permeates the village, and it seems unlikely wartime atrocities will simply be washed away by the biting, torrential rain he huddles in. D.O.P. Aleksandar Pavlovi, in shadowy greens and browns under an inky sky, evocatively paints the forest not as a place of shelter and safety, but one of existential gloom, the sombre moodiness reinforced by a spare soundtrack.
The background of the Ustasha’s rise, its ideological underpinnings, and its war crimes are not closely delved into, and without prior contextual knowledge, the politics of the time come across as murky and vague. This is a film that is interested less in geopolitics than in a portrait of human nature under strain and starved of options, forging pragmatic allegiances for survival. Beyond a few dreamscape sequences, we do not venture far into Mijo’s inner world or internal conflict, in a film that hangs greater consequence on his family’s near-starvation, and suggests simple people are mere pawns of wider historical forces. There is a sinister swagger and self-importance to the militaristic ambitions to power and influence of Rude (Nedim Nezirovic), the shiny-booted brother of his then-new sweetheart Drenka, as the festivities night of the newly declared puppet state draws revellers together. Mijo, by contrast, is more focused on catching carefree moments with his sweetheart as they cross the woodland to converge on the party. He is sucked into fascist complicity by circumstance and a creeping amorality, rather than malice.
In the summer of 1943, the villagers are banned from keeping dogs after one bites a gendarme. A traumatic, shocking incident — all the more devastating, by playing out through suspense and off-screen suggestion — offers a key to Mijo’s derailment by brutality, after his father orders him to get rid of beloved farm dog Garo, and the family cannot afford a merciful bullet. Violence begets violence, and in wartime, cruelty spreads like a contagion, Ankovic suggests in such symbolism-laden moments. The howl of surrounding wolves as night closes in on the woods seems no less than a stark foreboding of predatory times closing in on wartime Europe, an alarm signal from nature with special resonance today on a continent again lurching to the far right.
Director: Bruno Ankovic
Screenwriter: Jelena Paljan
Cast: Bernard Tomic, Kresimir Mikic, Klara Fiolic, Lars Stern, Jan Dolezal, Nedim Nezirovic, Tanja Smoje, Izudin Bajrovic, David Tasic Daf
Producers: Rea Rajcic, Tina Tisljar
Cinematographer: Aleksandar Pavlovi
Editing: Tomislav Stojanovic
Music: Alen Sinkauz, Nenad Sinkauz
Sound: Julij Zornik
Production companies: Eclectica (Croatia), Pakt Media (Croatia)
Sales: Eclectica (Croatia)
Venue: Karlovy Vary (Crystal Globe Competition)
In Croatian
86 minutes
