She has a desire that is opposite to what the society and family would want from her, and she knows that confronting them would mean being expelled. She was definitely my favourite character to write. But she’s also impulsive and immature in the way she believes she understands the world – yet she doesn’t. She’s wise beyond her age because of her relationship to her family. As we understand her environment, we also understand where her emotions and frustrations come from and how they lure her towards a transformation. I wanted to trick the audience a bit, that we have just a feisty teenager. The main character, Julija, seems like an angsty teenager, but there is more to her. That was the biggest gift, when those things clicked together. And Leon unlocked Ante’s need to be loved, and his chauvinistic ways of begging for love. Other than that, I was observing and taking in their micro-dynamics and infusing them into how I was going to shoot these scenes.ĭanica understood and totally unlocked Nela’s fragility and resilience. Sometimes they would be inside the characters for six hours at a time, and I would just throw the situations at them and slightly adjust once they were acting out of the character. They had these dynamics of that family from morning to night. I brought my actors to the island and we spent a month there together. How did you build the characters in this setting with the actors? Not ugly in a simplistic way but as in discomfort, dryness and a sense of insecurity.
And the heat had to come not from the plot, but from within the characters.įor me and my DoP Helene Louvart, the biggest challenge was how to show something that’s so intrinsically stunning as ugly. I wanted to see how these very simple dynamics can escalate if I turn on the heat more and more. I used this in Into the Blue and realized that I want to explore more of that world in my feature film.
It was an image of being completely alone and free and given to this stark nature – a very violent environment in terms of high rocks and sea, but also in terms of the danger inside me, with hormones kicking full on. The story was born from an image on an island where I used to spend summers with my grandmother and great-grandmother. It will receive its North America premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in September. Modern Films recently secured UK and Ireland rights to the drama from The Match Factory, which handles international sales. The film, which premiered in Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes, is an expansion of sorts on Kusijanović’s Berlinale-awarded short Into the Blue. The cast includes newcomer Gracija Filipović, Leon Lučev, Danica Ćurčić and Cliff Curtis. The drama centres on a family living on a seemingly idyllic Croatian island, who are fixated on the idea of selling up and reversing their past mistakes.
With her feature directorial debut Murina, Croatian filmmaker Antoneta Alamat Kusijanović won the Camera d’Or at Cannes and is now competing at Sarajevo Film Festival.