Celebration

Original Title: Proslava

Directed by: Bruno Anković

Country: Croatia

Length: 86 min.

Year: 2024

Premiere: Karlovy Vary Film Festival 2024

Synopsis: a young man hides from soldiers at the end of 1945 in the mountains of Croatia. The film recounts events and fragments of his life that lead him into that situation.

RATING: 4/5

 

REVIEW

Celebration has a balance that very few films are able to maintain: a very short duration, but a pace that is not rushed at all, and a deep range of analysis that rarely films this short can achieve. 

The setting: the periods before and after the second world war, in the rural, mountain areas. A landscape of utmost beauty that the film never ceases to exploit in the best possible ways. With an aesthetic that predominantly employs natural light, Celebration feels both concrete and tangible and absolutely ethereal. Its blue hour aesthetics and topic make it very much assimilable to a whole series of war-related contemporary east european films, such as Sharunas Bartas' At Dusk, or Dénes Nagy's Natural Light. 

The uniqueness of Celebration lies in its narrational form: with the confidence of a modernist novel, this adaptation from Damir Karakaš jumps between different timeframes, with a non-linear coherence, a thematic reiteration that is subtle but perceptible enough, and a remarkable hermetism.

Celebration is a deeply atmospheric film, constructing both through its visuals and sound a sense of dour despair. The idea is to convey the hardships of the life of a family of croatian mountain shepherds, with fascinating results.

What is perhaps the most remarkable aspect of Celebration is that it builds a mystery: a hidden backstory becomes very evident from the start of the film, but hardly referenced enough to be decrypted - until the very end of the film. Playing with the expectations of an audience that has been trained by decades of war-related cinema, Celebration ends shockingly, with a sour feeling of realisation that questions any previous emotional involvement. 

While Celebration's political alignment is so subtle that can be deemed excessively non-existent by some, it is perhaps one of the films that better manages to convey the effects of an ideology on society, and to make participate the viewer on an emotional level to the process of radicalisation. Therein lies the ultimate success of this small, but exceptional film.