Three stories, three decades, three realities, same land, same war, same actors.

Between 1991 2001 and 2011: war, consequences, repercussions.

1991 Ivan and Jelena are two young people who love each other in the sun and bathe at the lake, despite checkpoints, despite their rival ethnic groups, despite family conflicts.

Sasha does not accept that Jelena, his sister, loves an enemy, trumpeter Ivan, a young musician enchanted and crazy as love for a girl more rebellious than he is.

But there is no place for the triumph of imagination during the war, and Ivan's grandmother, in her enlightened dementia, foretells the ghost of Hitler, a metaphor for what is to come...

2001 Ante and Natasa. The war is over but the aftermath is not. Natasa's mother tries to salvage the half-destroyed house by getting help from Ante a Croatian laborer who works to support himself and his drug-abusing mother. They try to start a new life while the girl has great anger and isolates herself in her music-filled headphones: her brother, a Serb like her, was killed like a dog and a Croat in the house, does not seem acceptable to her. Despite the fact that they are the same age and have both experienced the same fate that the war has dealt them, a radical impossibility of communication will only succeed in giving voice to a close encounter of their bodies through which the one seems to use the other who in turn will repay the service.

War never ends only with peace....

2011 Luka and Marjia

He is a college student and returns to Split for a drug and techno rave. But his mind is elsewhere, at his family of origin, whom he visits for a social call, and at Marjia raising her son.

A ray of sunlight illuminates a cemetery where Ivan's body lies....

A deafening drug-fueled rave sequence ends the initial bucolic romance in a final "synthetic" outcome, but a psychedelic ray of hope is not missing.

Written and directed by Croatian director Dalibor Matanic, it won Un Certain Regard at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival.

Excellent performances plow through a cross-section of war where the characters, though shifted from one decade to another and from one reality to another, always turn out to be accompanied by the crazy shrapnel that war manages to perpetrate over time.

The troubled tale of a "love in the time of war," where it sharply represents a plunge into the murky waters of that minority which the Kantian Enlightenment motto had largely demonized.

27-Jun-2023 by Beatrice