We also present two more films from the competitive program – Giannis in the Cities by Eleni Alexandrakis and Waterdrop by Robert Budina
The Serbian star Mirjana Karanovic premiered her new film, as both screenwriter and director, Mother Mara at the Sarajevo '24 festival and was greeted with well-deserved applause. Well known to several generations of European cinema enthusiasts for her roles in Emir Kusturica’s When Father was away on Business and Underground, Jasmina Zbanic’s Grabavica: The Land of my Dreams, and many others, Karanovic continues to challenge herself with creative endeavors. Her new auteur film – in which she also takes on the lead role – is inspired by Tanja Šljivar’s play We Are the Ones Our Parents Warned Us About, with co-screenwriters Maja Pelević and Ognjen Sviličić contributing. The story follows a successful businesswoman trying to cope with the grief following the death of her 20-year-old son. Mara continues to work actively and embarks on a love affair with a man much younger than herself. Karanovic bares her heroine—both physically and emotionally—for the audience, depicting this story in a dramatic and poignant manner. Mother Mara becomes a timely and skillful challenge to the social clichés that still define the status of middle-aged women in many societies around the world.
The creative consultant for the film is Darko Lungulov, and the co-producing team also includes directors Andrea Štaka and Jasmila Žbanić, with whom Karanovic has collaborated over the years. Here is what she shared about her work on the film in an interview for The Hollywood Reporter:
“For me, Mara is a woman who conformed to that patriarchal rule of life and deeply buried within herself everything that is her true essence. With the death of her son, that hidden content lost its armor, its cocoon, and what I see as her impact in this film is a tremendous longing for life, which, well, was triggered by death. So for me this is truly a clash of Thanatos and Eros, and such a story and such a character are something very exciting and very unexpected for me. Just as I surprised myself that at the age of 60, I still have curiosity, energy, and a desire for something different and new.”
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Giannis in the Cities is the new film by the experienced screenwriter, producer, and director Eleni Alexandrakis, who takes us back more than seven decades and sets the action at the end of the Greek Civil War. The main character is Giannis, the son of a rebel who was deported from his native village and placed in special care homes for children—institutions established in various cities under the pretext of “rescue from poverty” but actually designed to re-educate the younger generation. Only when he reaches adulthood does Giannis realize that he was deliberately manipulated for much of his childhood into hating his father, and he decides that he must meet him in order to clear away the weight of the past. It turns out that his father has found refuge in the city of Varna and is part of the wave of Greek refugees who sought shelter in Bulgaria during the socialist era…
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According to an old Albanian proverb, a drop of water can wash a boy clean, while an entire sea might not suffice to cleanse a girl—especially if something happens that tarnishes her honor. In his third film, Waterdrop, Albanian director Robert Budina relies on this poetic metaphor: a single drop can provoke radical changes. Moreover, the film’s main heroine struggles to overcome serious prejudices against active women who occupy leadership positions—often associated with state corruption—while doing everything in her power to protect her teenage son, who is accused of sexually assaulting one of his schoolmates. Lake Ohrid, along whose shores the action unfolds, hides many secrets, and at the same time, just one drop of water is enough to overflow the accumulated tension and perhaps reveal the long-desired truth…
Robert Budina and his wife, Sabina Kodra, founded the production company Erafilm Production in 2001. For more than two decades, they have produced and promoted independent Albanian projects and co-productions, some of which have been showcased at Sofia Film Festival – such as the world premiere of Balkan Bazaar in 2011, which was presented as a project at Sofia Meetings and directed by Robert’s brother, Edmond Budina. Robert Budina’s previous two feature films, Sunrise and A Shelter Among the Clouds, have been shown at dozens of international festivals and have won numerous awards. The world premiere of his third film, Waterdrop, was part of the program at Warsaw ‘24.
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