Murina

Antoneta Alamat Kušijanović's Murina won the Caméra d'Or (the Cannes prize for best first feature across all sections) at Cannes 2021. The film consolidated Kušijanović as one of the most distinctive new Croatian directorial voices of her generation. Martin Scorsese executive-produced the project. Gracija Filipović, in the central role, was sixteen during production and anchors the film with one of the most distinguished recent young-actress performances in regional 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 her father's wealthy old friend Javier (Cliff Curtis), now an international real-estate dealer, arrives to inspect the property Ante is hoping to sell to him, Julija sees in Javier the possibility of a different future — a way out of the island, the family, and the role her father has assigned her. Danica Ćurčić plays Julija's mother Nela.

Hélène Louvart's photography of the Croatian Adriatic coastline — the underwater diving sequences, the sun-bleached island geography, the night-sea exteriors — produced one of the most distinctive visual registers in recent regional European cinema. The film operates simultaneously as coming-of-age drama, character study of a stifling family environment, and quiet meditation on what kind of decisions are actually available to young women in tight rural-coastal economies. Filipović's central performance — physically committed, emotionally restrained — is one for the long memory.