After winter

Original title: Poslije zime
Genre: Drama
Director: Ivan Bakrač
Country: Montenegro / Serbia / Croatia
Year of production: 2022
Czas: 101 min

Awards and nominations:
2021 Karlovy Vary International Film Festival: nominated for Best Feature Film

Five friends from the Montenegrin town of Nikšić are still living small-big dreams. They nurture their friendships, love affairs and youthful fascinations, but now only with the power of momentum and at the dying speed. Fate has thrown them into the various regions of the former Yugoslavia, where the echoes of recent wars, family dramas and irreparable losses still resound strongly. However, it is not the past, but the "here and now" and a series of life-defining events that will overwrite their escapism into something resembling a working draft of responsibility for themselves and others. However, when the eponymous winter comes to an end, each of them will have to start building their world - somehow anew and seriously. In his full-length debut, Ivan Bakrač makes a extremely successful attempt to capture the last moments of youth of today’s twenty-somethings, who are in a kind of intermediate zone between the afterimages of naive carefreeness and the great unknown of tomorrow. At the moment when they will come to define themselves - however tentatively and exaggeratedly - and take the first, uncertain step towards adulthood. Fine-tuned in terms of the script, dialogues and character building, Bakrač's film is a self-reflection stretched between responsibility and idyll, morality and comedy, which does not provide any answers as to what comes next, but is a penetratingly moving description of the liminal moment, when escape from the former self is as inevitable as the effort of returning to homes that are left behind is futile. Bartosz Szarek
Author: Bartosz Szarek

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Ivan Bakrač – graduated from the Faculty of Applied Art and Design of the University of Arts in Belgrade with a master's degree in directing. Apart from film, he tries his hand at architecture, painting and photography. His short and medium-length works have been recognized with awards and nominations at more than 60 international film festivals, including London (BFI), Zurich (ZFF), Turin (TFF), Belo Horizonte, Zlín and Küstendorf. Participant of the Berlinale Talents and Talents Sarajevo programs.