I usually catch a few Montenegrin films during the Zagreb Film Festival, when in the accompanying section they also offer some works from partner festivals online for free. This time, the choice fell on “After the Winter”, the debut feature film of Ivan Bakrač, which was once also in domestic cinema distribution, and it is a drama in which we follow the fate of five childhood friends in Nikšić over a long period of time. Life scattered Jana (Ivona Kustudić), Marija (Ana Vučković), Mladen (Momčilo Otašević), Dača (Petar Burić) and Buba (Maja Šuša) to various parts of the former country. Today, they are all on the threshold of their thirties, and as is often the case in reality, it is as if they are all still stuck somewhere halfway between youth and would like to continue to behave as they did when they were ten years younger and the seriousness that comes with age.
Jana and Marija live in Kotor and work in a bakery and hope for a better job and life in general, and their relationship will begin to change when Marija gets a venereal disease from her boyfriend. Mladen and Dača are roommates in Belgrade, where they stayed to live after college, and they will head to Montenegro during the summer to visit family and friends, but a visit to a mysterious guy who lives alone in the countryside and is a friend of Mladen’s father will change their lives. . Bubi, on the other hand, lives in Novi Sad, where he is still studying French and waiters, and visiting her during the Exit festival is one of the rituals of this entire team.
And for all of them, life is in some kind of chaos, and this existentialist drama seems to have somewhat followed the trend of European cinematography, which often deals with the problems of a generation that seems to be still stuck between youth and serious years. All of them will eventually have to mature in their own way, face the problems they previously avoided and believed would somehow disappear by themselves, just as similar problems disappeared when you were 18 or 20 years old. And in the end it was quite solid and “After Winter” is a correct film that manages to avoid the standard clichés that films with a similar theme often fall into, and it reminded me a bit of Lawrence Kasdan’s “The Big Chill”, although the characters there are somewhat older.