Croatian director Antoneta Alamat Kusijanović signs a sensual first feature film, which stages on a paradise island off the coast of Croatia Julija, a young girl oppressed by the machismo and authoritarianism of her father, in search of emancipation. Murina is in theaters from April 20, 2022.
Julija (Gracija Filipović) lives on a paradise Croatian island with her father Ante (Leon Lučev) and her mother Nela Danica Ćurčić. The young girl, under the control of an authoritarian and macho father, finds refuge in the depths of the sea. She fishes in the morning with her father, later in the day she swims or drowns her boredom by staring into the blue of the horizon. From the Spartan house overlooking the bay, she also observes the golden youth lounging on luxurious yachts anchored under her windows.
Paradise or golden prison? The young girl, like her mother, obeys the father’s orders and supports his mood swings without flinching, until the day when Javier (Cliff Curtis), a handsome, rich and old friend of his father…
Despite a limitless azure blue horizon, this first feature film by Croatian director Antoneta Alamat Kusijanović is built like a camera, the camera closest to the family trio made up of a tyrannical husband and father, an ex-mother -miss beauty, submissive to her husband, and a young girl full of vitality. Her wild beauty disturbs the father, but also disturbs the men who gravitate around the clan: “Your daughter walks around naked like a tease…”
This first feature film co-produced by Martin Scorsese, hailed at the 74th edition of the Cannes Film Festival in 2021, offers a critical look at a patriarchal, macho society, locked into principles and behaviors that one of the characters qualifies as ‘“arrears”.
The irruption in this closed world of a foreign element, embodied by Javier, brings a breath from elsewhere, a breach in the established order. With the arrival of this attractive millionaire, former suitor of Nela (the mother of the family), levity, laughter and sensuality are invited, usually forbidden in the family camera. His presence makes Juliya want to escape to other horizons.
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The landscapes are both sublime and disturbing, arid, often hostile. The camera captures the brutality of this mineral and maritime world, closed in on itself, despite the illusion of an ever-open horizon. The omnipresent sea acts as a refuge as well as a barrier with the outside world. A belly that is sometimes reassuring, sometimes gloomy, from which the young girl will try to extricate herself as from a womb, an allegory of a new birth.
Will Javier keep his promises? Will Juljia succeed in emancipating herself from the tutelage of her father and from this ancestral world frozen in the principles of another age? Is this other world of which the young girl dreams better than the one in which she grew up?
The film raises all these questions without trying to resolve them, or to convince us, capturing the complexity of human relations in the suspended gazes, the unspoken, the silences, in a ray of light or in the desperate gesture of a “Murina” (Moray eel) to free themselves from the fisherman’s harpoon.
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The actors, and in particular Gracija Filipović, are there. The young actress, already the heroine of the director’s short film Into the blue, worked on her role in Murina with the director for four years. The young actress, a very strong screen presence, perfectly embodies this age of all possibilities, an overflowing sensuality and this rebellion that she strikes at a mother who has chosen resignation.
Murinais a very beautiful first film, sensual and committed, in the spirit of Mustangof Turkish filmmaker Deniz Gamze Ergüven, who evoked in 2015 the desire for emancipation of siblings of girls under the yoke of an authoritarian father.
Gender : Drama
Director: Antoneta Alamat Kusijanovic
Actors: Gracija Filipović, Danica Ćurčić, Leon Lucev, Cliff Curtis
Country : Croatia, Brazil, United States, Slovenia
Duration : 1h36
Exit : April 20, 2022
Distributer : KMBO
Summary: On the Croatian island where she lives, Julija suffers from her father’s excessive authority. Comfort, she finds it in contact with her mother – and the sea, a refuge whose riches she explores. The arrival of a rich friend of his father exacerbates tensions within the family. Will Julija succeed in winning her freedom?