Belgrade



Croatian Cinema nowadays produces 6 to 9 feature films per year, also 60 minutes of animation, experimental films, documentaries, as a bigger cultural prestige in Croatia. National cinema attracts about at 2,7 million tickets average. Ever since year of 2000, this small cinematography functions in a free environment for the first time after the civil war in 90s. One of the most popular author in the contemporary Croatian cinema and the represent of the old Croatian film as well, is most definitely Rajko Grlić. Grlić graduated a feature film directing at FAMU Film Academy in Prague, Czech Republic and by now he has directed and co-written about ten feature films. His films have been showed and distributed all around the world and it has been visited many major film festivals, for instance Cannes Film Festival: received at least fifty international awards, including the Tokyo International Film Festival “Grand Prix” and “Best Director”. Today Grlić works at Film Department at Ohio University www.finearts.ohio.edu/film.


What is under the respectable surface of middle class in Croatia today? Grlić brand new film Just Between Us www.justbetweenusmovie.com a drama comedy of manners, sets back Grlić to his roots (before civil war in old Jugoslavia). It seems that Balkan Cinema really need erotic domestic-set movies: and film Just Between Us is story about loneliness, adultery and urban life. Here, emotions and erotic passion breaking through a roof: Miki Manojlović a Serb actor has returned to Croatian erotic drama in another Grlić’s directorial. Fourth time they have worked together and their prior relationships on film have been much successful in the past.


Today, when the film directors in Croatia are making social and postwar drama films, an exploring a real erotic relationships between man and woman is extremly rare. Lets hope that adulterers, charismatic visionaries and sexy outlaws on screen will replace revolutionaries and post civile war stories. This is a compelling drama that, without any hypocrisy, displays real life adultery as an everyday reality. Sex scenes are here highly aesthetical and indeed the most provoking in Croatian film for quite some time. Beautiful and cruel reality virtues out of this elegant and smooth (melo)drama! “There is a claim in sociology that adultery, love adventure or whatever you call it, is the only way of rebellion left for men against life’s predictability,” concluded Grlić. Life is full of personal boundaries, state limit, media, money rules: this is what we need. “It is extremely open, and from time to time brutal, especially when dealing with intimate topics, with an effort to go under the skin, beyond visible,” Grlić explained. With such a good, old, sexy drama, it seems that almost no other Rajko’s film existed before.


There are many stories on screen, about adulteries and double lives and there is always a certain fascination about it, no matter of political regimes or goverments. It is human nature to have certain level of admiration for energy and imagination of such stories. Among our fellow mammals, males are invariably aggressive sexual adventurers driven by their genes to couple with as many partners as possible. Unlike animals, which have no consciences, human beings can choose whether to act upon an impulse or to suppress it. This rather complex issue involves ramifications on emotional, social, and moral fields. A primal motivation that subjects adultery on film is common to every country in the world, and it is a common factor for proper identification factor (for other nation to find an identification code, important for interracial and international understanding), which is very important (and pretty rare in Balkan Film) for domestic film to have: in order to be recognised abroad or in America: Grlić lives in Ohio, USA at the moment.
Welcome back Rajko Grlić!