Marija Škaričić is Ana Mlikota, a doctor of science and anthropologist who is particularly fascinated by traces on stećci. She plans to write a book about stećci, which are called mirila, and they can be found on Velebit vrleti and are part of the local funeral tradition that lasted from the 17th century until somewhere in the first half of the 20th century. The yardsticks, or standards, actually represented the length of the deceased, and the place where the bearers briefly left the bodies of the deceased on the way to the cemetery was later paved with stone on which shallow reliefs were carved. Ana will soon have to deal with a deceased person, since her father will die, and she will not only be left alone in a spacious apartment in the old center of Zagreb, but also the only survivor in a once large family.
In addition, Ana suffers from some skin disease, i.e. loss of pigmentation on her face and body, which she hides with her makeup. Coping with the loss of her father will begin to intertwine with the existential crisis that she has obviously been experiencing for a long time, and researching the traces in the stećci, as if it will be a guide for her to fight with her own demons and her own trauma. “Traces” was the debut feature film of Dubravka Turić, who previously won awards at numerous world festivals for her short films, and it is an intimate, characterful study that Škaričić carries with a quality performance.
In the end, this is a solid, intimate drama and a sort of continuation of the series in Croatian film that began in previous years with films such as “Mater”, “Mare” or “Tereza37”, in which we have strong female main characters who in some way discover themselves. Ana is also a woman who seems to cling firmly to the past, which is partly not surprising because of her occupation and as if she is afraid to face the changes that life and age bring. And she is no longer in the prime of her youth and is a good forty years old, and she is still alone and childless, and it does not seem that she would change anything in her life, while her social activity is certainly affected by an unpleasant illness. However, the realization that she was left completely alone after her father’s death seems to be the trigger for her to try to change something in her life.