That’s How The Summer Ended

There’s a sense of nostalgia right from the beginning of Matjaz Ivanisin’s beguiling short That’s How The Summer Ended, which is created by the title itself, with its past tense instantly eliciting a flood of personal memories of summers gone by. This mood seems to be redolent in every aspect of the film – from its sun-kissed visuals, to its languorous pace, and slow and lazy demeanour. Having premiered recently in the Concorso Corti d’autore at Locarno, the film now competes as part of the short film Competition at Sarajevo Film Festival.

With the aforementioned degree of melancholy implicit before a frame has even been projected, Ivanisin and his team can afford to be fairly spartan with the narrative crumbs they provide the audience once things have actually started. A man (Ales Jesenicnik) and a woman (Kristina Olovec), who seem to have a casual relationship, bump into each other on the street and head over to a nearby lake to watch the preparations for an air show taking place overhead. Another man then arrives, apparently to see the woman, and the status of the relationship is called into question.

All of these details are picked up through subtle queues and physical nuances rather than expository dialogue or explicit drama. Ivanisin creates an ambience which manages to feel both laden with unspoken emotional commitment and also the relaxed vibe of a warm summer’s day. It is perhaps the cognitive dissonance of these two aspects that give the film its surreal edge, in which a situation which might be interpreted as the revelation of betrayal and infidelity is treated with silence and a stroll by a lake. At the same time, the vapour trails left across the sky by a loop-the-looping pilot add a slightly tongue-in-cheek frivolity via visual innuendo. What is so striking about That’s How the Summer Ended, though, is how its general vibe and the poignancy of its final moments manage to linger long after the credits roll.

Director, screenplay: Matjaz Ivanisin
Cast: Ales Jesenicnik, Kristina Olovec, Jernej Jerovsek
Producers: Miha Cernec Jozko Rutar Andras Muhi
Cinematography: Gregor Bozic
Editor: Uja Irgolic, Matic Drakulic
Sound: Julij Zornik
Production companies: Staragara (Slovenia), Focus Fox (Hungary), Staragara IT (Italy)
Venue: Sarajevo Film Festival (Competition – Short Film)
In Slovenian
13 minutes