European Films

A father and his 14-year-old son travel from contemporary rural Bosnia to the Croatian capital for a film audition in director Ognjen Svilicic’s Armin. Going the exact opposite route of the riotous bombast of Sarajevo-born filmmaker Emir Kusturica, Svilicic (Oprosti za kung fu/Sorry for Kong Fu) films his drama as an intimate two-hander that mainly plays out between father and son. The film’s contents may not be revolutionary enough to travel far and wide, but its sweet nature and good humour will certainly seduce some. It won the main prize in the East of the West Competition at the recent Karlovy Vary International Film Festival and was also screened at this year’s Berlinale.

Armin (Armin Omerovic, Put lubenica/The Melon Route, which Svilicic co-wrote) is taken on a cross-country trip to a five-star hotel in Zagreb by his father Ibro (veteran Emir Hadzihafizbegovic, Karaula) for an audition for a part in a drama a German company wants to film there. When Armin gets a look at the script and his father asks him what it is about, Armin’s enthusiasm seems to have evaporated: "It is about the war again. It’s stupid". His father, who has perhaps never set foot in a cinema but must be aware that acting can be a lucrative career for his son, replies pragmatically: "A foreign movie can’t be stupid".

Armin, itself a Bosnian-Croatian-German co-production, follows the father-son dynamics up-close throughout the film, frequently keeping the camera glued to the men’s faces: the round face of Armin, with its typical baby fat and facial down that signals the innocence of youth, and the hardened and angular face of his father, who consciously lived through the war and wants to offer his son his best shot at this opportunity for a better life.

Ibro, in fact, believes so much in Armin’s capacity to become a successful actor that he has already started spending the future earnings of his future well-known actor son on cigarettes, souvenirs and meals at fast-food outlets ("It’s so clean here, it looks like a hospital"). Is he just overspending to make his son feel more comfortable or is he misreading the signs sent by the production company. "If they paid this much for our night a the hotel, we must have come for something," he seems to think.

Stanko Hercig’s well-lit cinematography is one of the key elements in establishing the film’s mood and revealing character: the things Armin and Irbo say and the things they mean do not always coincide and the combination of frequent close-ups and the actors’ strong yet subtle work convey all sorts of emotions that are being left unsaid. In bringing into a focus a father-son relationship that is not primarily based on words, Armin succeeds.

Like Golden Bear winner Grbavica before it, it deals with the relationship between a parent and an adolescent child against the background of a society still impacted by a war that ended some years ago, though unlike that film (in which Hadzihafizbegovic co-starred) what is at stake in Armin never feels so powerful that it completely envelops the viewer. The connections to the war are far more fleeting here -- at least until a bizarre twist towards the end. As just the story of a father and son, it might not be different or original enough to find might much footing abroad.

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