Then I See Tanja

Onda vidim Tanju
Juraj Lerotić, Croatia, 2010, HDCAM (digiBeta), 34'

Željko (16) and his younger brother have been living on their own since their mother was admitted to hospital. Željko has his mind set on two things: to finally take the initiative to meet Tanja, and to earn some money to buy his Mum a wig. A real one, made from human hair. If he achieves these two goals, then things might take a turn for the better. The film Then I See Tanja is a coming-of-age story constructed almost entirely from still photographs.  

Juraj Lerotić

Born 1978 in Kiel, Germany. In 2001 he graduated from the Faculty of Philosophy in Zadar with a major in preschool education. Currently, he is a senior undergraduate of film and tv directing at the Academy of Dramatic Art in Zagreb. Then I See Tanja has been shown on festivals around the Globe and also at the Rotterdam Film Festival.


Short Film Stars from Croatia

To get free hands and make a selection of films gathered around one given topic is always a thrilling and pleasurable experience. When the festival asked me to come up with a representative film proposal emerging from neighboring Croatia, in the blink of an eye it seemed nearly obvious that the program should center on a couple of Croatian short films, which in recent years have traveled an admirable path in the international and domestic festival circuits.

In the past several years, I’ve been mostly watching and curating short films – and while getting familiar with this vast universe of shorts, a premise that one instantly assumes and hears from many filmmakers, fellow colleagues and professionals alike is that short film is one big-time neglected and marginalized film format – not only by film festivals and audiences (should one even bother mentioning never-gonna-happen national or local distribution releases?), but often by filmmakers and producers themselves. To a certain extent, one could start listing the arguments to support this thought, but quite quickly, it becomes clear that such a judgment comes as somewhat of a heavy-handed hindrance, and one quickly tries to abandon it, as the strong presence of brilliant short films and their growing support in formal and alternative distribution platforms unveil themselves. 

Truth to be told, the production of short films is so abundant, that one disadvantage that one certainly does encounter in dealing professionally with shorts is the inability to ever know how many films remain unviewed, getting lost among the gigabytes of some obscure Internet video library. The number of short films produced in a year is probably uncountable, but from a personal perspective, an average number of shorts viewed by a curator certainly reaches a couple thousand (sure, not every short is watched in its entirety). And yet, one feels that if there were only twice as much time available to browse through the few thousands more, one would be sure to find a few more of those brilliant examples that have perfectly used the boundless creative space that the short film form can offer. Not to mention the pleasure of seeing those filmmakers making their way through the festivals and on to further professional challenges. 

Coming back to this program: a given topic, or in other words, a certain boundary upon which one can narrow their selection, comes almost as a relief. Having selected four Croatian films where each has been internationally acclaimed by most established film festivals hardly feels like having made a difficult choice; but besides their success, it is their exceptional quality that comes first and foremost. Two young talents, Michaela Mueller (Miramare) and Juraj Lerotić (Then I See Tanja), come across as artistically mature auteurs, perfectly understanding and using the variety of narrative forms and techniques a short film can offer – which, in their cases, is animation and photography. The following two, more formally conventional, titles belong to Dalibor Matanić (The Party) and Zvonimir Jurić (Yellow Moon), directors who have established their careers years ago each having made a couple of successful feature films before choosing to direct short films again. What they have come up with is perhaps some of their best work to date, setting splendid examples that will hopefully inspire more filmmakers to occasionally venture towards directing short films. 

Vanja Kaluđerčić