No One´s Son

Film Info

Croatia 2009 | 100 min. Director: Arsen Anton Ostojic

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No One´s Son

Synopsis

Ivan is a 36-year-old ex-rock singer and a disillusioned war veteran who lost both legs in the recent Croatian Homeland War. His father, Izidor, was a well-known political prisoner in the former Yugoslavia, and is now standing as an independent candidate for the Croatian Parliament. Then a face from the past re-appears: an impoverished Serbian refugee called Simo, who has recently returned to the town. As an ex-communist official, Simo imprisoned Izidor decades ago. He knows certain facts about Izidor that could destroy his reputation and wreck his political campaign. Simo demands money, in return for his silence and he also has a secret rendezvous with Ivan’s mother, Ana.
Soon a long-buried secret surfaces once more – with huge repercussions for Ivan. He starts to provoke hard-line Croatians by singing Serbian nationalistic songs, daring them to kill him.

Cast & Crew

Director

Arsen Anton Ostojic
Producer

Mate Matisic
Screenwriter

Mate Matisic
Director of photography

Branko Linta, Branko Linta
Main Cast

Alen Liveric (Ivan), Mustafa Nadarevic (Izidor), Biserka Ipsa (Ana), Zdenko Jelcic (Simo), Goran Grgic (inspector)

Director's comment

The most important element that attracted me to the screenplay No One’s Son, written by Mate Matisic and based on his own play, is the fact that the script offered an uncompromising and brave look into the reality of the Croatian society today through an emotional story about a physically disabled war veteran and his psychological traumas. Aside from being another “heavy” drama, this script, I felt, had successfully combined the elements of genre (crime story) and a classical Greek tragedy, in which characters are forced to make fundamental decisions about life and death and where father and son issues become a truly important subject.
On one level this film functions as a crime drama featuring a police investigation, while, more importantly, it deals with fundamental problems that preoccupied the nations of the Western Balkans through centuries of bloody wars and migrations. This story does not only become a tragedy for all the characters in it, each of them paying for their own sins and the sins of their ancestors, rather it develops into a tragedy of the entire region where numerous wars shattered the lives of its inhabitants and where the issue of identity in the midst of that terrible mess was one of the most important ones.