Kad mrtvi zapjevaju
Croatia,
1998, 104 min
Shown in 2000
CREDITS
- dir
-
Krsto Papic
- prod
-
Ljubo Sikic
- scr
-
Krsto Papic, Mate Matisic
- cam
-
Vjekoslav Vrdoljak
- editor
-
Robert Lisjak
- cast
-
Ivo Gregurevic, Ivica Vidovic, Mirjana Majurec, Ksenija Pajic
- source
-
Tony Mandich Productions, 4833 Del Moreno Dr., Woodland Hills, CA 91364. FAX: 818-702-0767
OTHER
Set in Berlin and rural Croatia, Krsto Papic’s newest feature is a farcical satire involving two immigrants trying to return to Croatia in 1991, only to discover that their villages and families have been unalterably transformed by interethnic strife. The tale begins when Cinco launches a half-baked scheme to declare himself dead and return home in a coffin so that he and his wife can live comfortably on his German pension. His compatriot Marinko, in political exile and still sought by a determined but nearsighted ex-Yugoslav secret police agent, inadvertently joins him on his odyssey, which includes subplots of an evil doctor secretly planning to sell the “dead” Cinco’s organs, a coffin switch that lands a Turkish corpse in Cinco’s living room and the tragedy of contemporary Balkan politics. While this low-budget film’s comic gags—including Cinco’s valiant graveyard defense of his village against the attacking Chetniks—border on the screwball, it is the underlying tragedy, both of the disillusioned Marinko haunted by the death of his friends and the loss of his family and of a society suffering from economic deprivation and the polarization of civil war, that gives When the Dead Start Singing its unique and oddly cathartic character.
—Lydia Freynal
FACTOID #27
A surrealist stop-motion animator, the Czech Jan Svankmajer, was the first recipient of the Golden Gate Persistence of Vision Award in 1997. The POV Award honors the lifetime achievement of a filmmaker who works outside of feature-length narrative filmmaking.
