BHFF: Nightguards

Those who work the graveyard shift live in a different world from their neighbors. Aside from family, most of the people they interact with are also nocturnal and many are a little strange. It can be somewhat alienating, but work is work. Mahir and Brizla just want to get through their nights without incident as the titular protagonists of Namik Kabil’s Nightguards (trailer here), which screened at the sixth annual Bosnian-Herzegovinian Film Festival.

It will be a long night for Mahir. Something is ailing him, frequently sidelining him from his duties. Usually, his nights are uneventful, spent quietly watching over the model showrooms of a large furniture store. His Ralph Kramden-esque friend Brizla works next door in the bath department, where he reads dated self-help books throughout his shift. Concerned by his younger colleague’s malady, Brizla diagnoses it as a psycho-somatic reaction to dredged up memories of the 1990’s war, evidently a widespread phenomenon he heard about in recent news reports.

On one level, Nightguards asks how pervasive are the lingering effects of recent Bosnian history? Is Mahir’s intestinal suffering rooted in the 1990’s, or is he just sick? However, it is most successful conveying the strange twilight existence they live, dealing with fellow nights owls, like the all-night baker, the cop on the nightshift, and the crank who lives across the street. Yet, Mahir and Brizla’s late-night environment is even more surreal, consisting of artificial scenes of domestic luxury.

The perpetually dark showrooms are part of an excellent looking production designed by Sanja Dzeba that really takes viewers into their late-night world. Kabil is a sensitive director with obvious affection for his working-class characters. His leads are also quite likable, particularly the engaging Vahid Piralic as the queasy Mahir. Milan Pavlovic nicely counter-balances him physically, with his sloppier look and Gabe Kaplan hair. Together they have a nice on-screen rapport and should prove easy for international audiences to relate to.

Since it largely takes place during the Mahir and Brizla’s late shift, Nightguards is a very dark film in a literal sense, but it actually ends on an optimistic note. It is a quiet, evocative film that was an appropriate conclusion to this year’s BHFF.

After the Nightguards screening, BHFF bestowed its audience awards to Slobodan Maksimović’s AgapE for Best Short or Feature Film and to Enes Zlatar’s Diagnosis S.B.H. for Best Documentary. For more information on the award winners and all the films BHFF screened this year, visit their website here.

BHFF: It’s Hard to Be Nice

The war has been over for more than ten years, but Sarajevo is still a dangerous city, where criminals operate with near impunity. Fudo ought to know, since he happens to be one. However, he is trying to go straight in Srđan Vuletić’s It’s Hard to Be Nice (trailer here), Bosnia and Herzegovina’s official selection for the Best Foreign Language Film of the 2008 Academy Awards, which screened last night at this year’s Bosnian-Herzegovinian Film Festival.

As a cab driver, Fudo is a creature of the night, rubbing shoulders with some unsavory customers. Not only does he sell valuable information to criminal gangs, he has even been known to run errands of a dubious nature himself. After a botched job earns Fudo a beat-down and black eye, his wife Azra temporarily moves out. To win his family back, Fudo agrees to go straight, but it proves more challenging than he expected (as the title suggests). His old criminal associate Sejo is determined to scare him crooked again, but a series of events convinces him of the necessity of virtue.

In a series of sharply written scenes, Fudo hires his new Renault minivan out to a group of Japanese tourists, allowing him an opportunity to see Sarajevo through the eyes of outsiders. He has no good answer when asked why his countrymen do not seem to value their own history. It pains him to see bullet holes defacing the sites of the 1984 Winter Olympics, a time he still remembers fondly. He also genuinely likes his guileless Japanese customers and bitterly resents it when the villainous Sejo tries to take advantage of them.

In the early scenes of Nice, Fudo commits just about every unseemly deed possible, while still maintaining the audience’s rooting interest. He might even alienate some viewers with his behavior, but he does come to a heart-felt conversion, which is the real point of the film. Sasa Petrovic brings a virile charisma to the deeply flawed Fudo, and his scenes with the Japanese tourists have a surprising depth of feeling, which makes the evolution of his character completely believable.

Vuletić’s screenplay is too street-smart to be called “feel good,” recognizing the costs involved in standing up to corruption in contemporary Bosnian society. He effectively uses the city of Sarajevo as a backdrop, capitalizing on its scarred beauty for dramatic effect. The on-screen action is perfectly complemented by a moving score composed by Saša Lošić, a popular Bosnian pop-rock figure, and Bosnian-born Srdan Krupjel, who has scored several British film and television projects.

Though at times rather dark, Nice is in fact a realistically hopeful film. That cautious optimism and Petrovic’s excellent performance are ultimately quite satisfying, making Vuletić’s film an excellent representative of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s cinema, well-suited to the BHFF’s mission.

BHFF: Man Still Goes to the Moon (Short)

The Moon has long been associated with madness in traditional folklore and contemporary psychology. It literally haunts the protagonist of Dragan Rokvić’s Man Still Goes to the Moon, an animated short that made its American premiere at the 2009 Bosnian-Herzegovinian Film Festival last night.

The year is 2096, one hundred and one years after the formal end of the Bosnian War, but the residents of Sarajevo are still fighting and dying. However, the war is now on the Moon and the enemy is never explicitly identified. The protagonist has returned to a future version of the city, evidently shell-shocked from his war experiences.

Rokvić’s stylized black-and-white animation turns out to be an excellent vehicle to illustrate the horrors of war in a science fiction setting. His visuals are quite memorable, particularly the sight of faceless soldiers encased in spacesuits and helmets, slowly drifting into cannon fire. It is a cold way to die, but as the narrator says: “It is always cold on the Moon.”

Approximately ten minutes long, Moon’s ghostly atmosphere is more important than the actual twist of its tale. The somewhat abstract animation is striking and his portrayal of war’s futile carnage comes across as a universal critique, rather than a specific political statement, which should generate enthusiastic audience reactions as it travels further on the film festival circuit.