Murina

Antoneta Alamat Kušijanović's Murina won the Caméra d'Or, the Cannes prize for the best first feature across all sections, at Cannes 2021, and marked Kušijanović out as one of the most distinctive new Croatian directors of her generation. Martin Scorsese executive-produced. Gracija Filipović, in the central role, was sixteen during production, and her performance is one of the finest by a young actress in the region's recent cinema.

On a sun-bleached Adriatic island in summer, seventeen-year-old Julija (Filipović) dives for murina, the long, eel-like Mediterranean fish of the title, under the suffocating control of her domineering father Ante (Leon Lučev). When his wealthy old friend Javier (Cliff Curtis), now an international real-estate dealer, arrives to look over the property Ante hopes to sell him, Julija sees in Javier the possibility of a different future: a way off the island, out of the family and out of the role her father has assigned her. Danica Ćurčić plays Julija's mother Nela.

Hélène Louvart's photography of the Croatian Adriatic coast, from the underwater diving sequences to the bleached island light and the night-sea exteriors, gives the film one of the most distinctive looks in recent European cinema from the region. It is a coming-of-age drama and a portrait of a stifling family, and it also asks, without preaching, what choices are really open to young women in tight rural and coastal economies. Filipović, physically committed and emotionally restrained, holds all of it together.