A Nation Emerges on Film

“Beyond Boundaries: The Emergence of Croatian Cinema” is the first in a four-part series of film retrospectives at the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Walter Reade Theater intended to survey the distinctive national cinemas of the Balkan Peninsula. The current 23-film survey seeks not just to present the contemporary Republic of Croatia’s post-Yugoslavian filmmaking, but to place the young nation’s emerging cinematic voice in the context of Croatia’s centuries-old cultural centrality within the Balkans. Included in that mission is a smaller one to cast the capital city of Zagreb as the former Yugoslavia’s most ambitiously experimental and free-thinking communist-era filmmaking city.That many of the contemporary films in this series touch on the religious and nationalist violence that has accompanied Yugoslavia’s separation into six different states nearly goes without saying. What’s compelling about the new films in “Beyond Boundaries” is the facility with which Croatia’s film community addresses headline-size recent history with intimate and honest storytelling verve.Writer-director Dejan Sorak’s “Two Players From the Bench” (2005) fuses the kind of caustic black comedy that was a Yugoslav film tradition while Marshal Tito was still alive and that was reborn under Franjo Tudman’s contentious leadership in the 1990s with a burgeoning odd-couple friendship and precipitating political conspiracy. Shanghaied and kept under house arrest in a deserted army barrack outside Zagreb, Croat Ante and Serb Dusko (each given marvelously full life by actors Goran Navojec and Borko Peric, respectively) accept an unusual and potentially lucrative assignment. If they agree to impersonate two thugs whose exculpatory testimony before a war crimes tribunal would exonerate a Croat army colonel, they’ll receive 20,000 euros. If not, they’ll never be heard from again.Despite the bleak setting and latter-day Kafkaesque Chinese box of conspiracies within conspiracies, “Two Players From the Bench” remains wry and engaging. Messrs. Navojec and Peric infuse their two-man act with skillful comic timing and an unselfconscious innocence that belies their increasingly dire predicament. The gently satirical touch of having Ante, and especially Dusko, throw themselves into their trial “roles” with the neurotic and proprietary enthusiasm of anxious actors is especially winning.Similarly, “Armin,” Croatia’s official entry for this year’s foreign film Oscar competition, employs the aftermath of Balkan political unrest to achieve disarmingly nonpolitical ends. The story of a Bosnian father and son who journey to Zagreb for a movie audition, “Armin” deflates any potential polemics or sanctimony by constructing a persuasive, realistically dysfunctional relationship between the circumspect accordian prodigy and his blustering and insecure stage father, Ibro. “Business is the most important thing,” Ibro says, and over the course of the film’s deft compendium of subtle character moments, it becomes clear that it is only through the business of trying to win his son a part in a German war epic set in Bosnia that Ibro is able to meaningfully connect with his boy.Among the highlights of the films in “Beyond Boundaries” that have been culled from Croatia’s communist past is a multi-film program showcasing the influential work of what admiring French film historian Georges Sadoul dubbed the “Zagreb School of Animation.” In the late 1950s, a documentary film company called Zagreb Film became the creative home of a group of animators working out of a hotel room studio. Fully embracing the practice of “limited animation,” whereby scarce materials were preserved and costs were kept to a minimum by reducing the amount of actual drawings needed to complete a film, Zagreb Film artists like Dušan Vukotic ‘ and Vatroslav Mimica revolutionized cartoon animation by scaling back on complex detail in favor of marvelously varied graphic conceits, unbidden flights of abstraction, and unusual musical scores. “Light Drawings: The Zagreb School of Animation” compiles 11 of these short works; they are remarkably varied in scope and execution and bear an immediacy, seemingly limitless design intelligence, and expedient clarity of expression that have influenced every generation of filmmakers that has come since.The end of socialism and the growth of democracy in Croatia have helped the country’s live-action film industry gain worldwide distribution and critical footholds that were impossible under communist rule. Locally, the Tribeca Film Festival has been particularly supportive of contemporary Croatian cinema. Ironically, however, advances in computer technology and free-market economic forces have consigned the Zagreb School’s conceptually sophisticated yet technically primitive work irrevocably to the Croatian cinema’s past.Through November 14 (70 Lincoln Center Plaza at Broadway and West 65th Street, 212-875-5601).

A Nation Emerges on Film

A Nation Emerges on Film

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