I Have To Sleep My Angel

Synopsis

Ex-Yugoslavia in the early 70s: in the countryside, a nine year-old boy seems to live an ordinary life with his parents and his mother's parents. His family is made of a number of different attitudes, origins and influences: The father, a doctor, is a Croat, the mother a Serb. The grandfather is a revolutionary communist of old times, the grandmother believes in God. The relation between the parents is full of misunderstandings and doomed to failure, so the young boy will witness a very complex and unfortunate love story.
Parallel to their story, echoes of the sexual revolution reverberate through Yugoslav society, too... The political movements of the 70s seem to be dangerous, especially for the young boy's best friend's father who happens to be an anti-Yugoslav activist.
The further the parents move away from each other, the more they realise how none of them did enough to keep their love alive...

Director's comment

The 70s were my childhood and the province of Bosnia and Herzegovina is where I grew up, many years after one war, and many years before the other one, multi-ethnic communist surrounding is what I am most familiar with, mother suffering but willing to give, these are the remnant pictures from my early years...
Women sharing their sincere and deep doubts, views stirred by emotions, prejudices they are not aware of, this and much more is what I've been given within this screenplay, thus shooting every single of those scenes for me was like a birth, helping, guiding, being there, but not daring to employ nor show enormous volcanic energy underlying beneath, the most truthful they were able to give, they gave it, and it was a tremendous precious gilt from the actors...
Italian neo-realism on one side and Russian cinematography on the other is where I've been hiding myself in front of the living, the same one which I've been trying to seize from the moment I've started to act, write, direct, create...
Andrija (Zafranovic) the editor, and Suzana (Peric), music editor, have been the closest collaborators to me and Tatjana (the scriptwriter, my sister), they were reading everything from the very first sentence, sending their feedbacks, questions... very, very soon Livio started to write the music, after the characters, themes, situations and traumas they will go through. Actors... we have chosen them long ago before the script was written, every single character was created for a specific actor...
The most realistic we were able to do, I have tried, together with the other authors, to reproduce the period, the costumes, the shoes, every single detail was from 70-72', production designers were engaged several years before the production, hundreds and hundreds of photographs gathered, compared, set dressing looked carefully for... so much passion everywhere around by all the authors was invested...
I guess this is the most intimate film I will ever make...

Film Info

Project / Host