Filmaktiv

A cinematic tapestry of candidates who spend every waking hour of their lives preparing for the entrance exam on the Academy of Dramatic Arts in Zagreb, showing us what led them to make these decisions, how their families reacted to them and opening the audience's eyes to the surprisngly cutthroat and emotionaly heavy world of the Croatian acting scene.

Through the figures of three women whose abusive relationships fall onto different forms of the spectrum, this docudrama aims to paint a psychologycal portrait of the abusers and their victims and the positions of both parties in Balkan society.

The protagonist of the movie is the small and crowded Croatian bus terminal in Rijeka the living-room of a town on the threshold of changes. As the plans for building a promised larger bus terminal are overshadowed by the busy preparations for Croatia's entering the EU, the old station "Zabica" continues serving as the crossroads for tourists and an integral part of the local community; where collective or individual memories and struggles are at disposal, cuddled and teased, subtle but salient. We follow the daily routines of the employees at the station's shops, the café, and the ticket office, the bus drivers and cabbies, the homeless and the drifters, the permanent visitors and the passersby, to discover a sporadic community in its vain, but persistent efforts at patching up the gaps of a worn-out system.

As a wave of violence, contemporary militarism, nationalism and the threat of a looming war spreads across Europe, documentary filmmaker Morana Komljenović explores the peculiar history of the peaceful retreat of the Yugoslav People's Army from the Croatian city of Rijeka during the earliest months of the Croatian War of Independance of the 1990s.