by Tina Kalinić
Pjer Žalica, through his filmmaking, managed to get a kind of “director of a small neighbourhood” status. His films are mostly intimate stories that are happening in small cities or in neighbourhoods of Sarajevo and deal with “little people” and their everyday lives.
First of May, Labour Day, has always been special in Sarajevo, not because of the protests that are organized or celebrations of big work accomplishments but because it is a day when nobody does anything at all. In Sarajevo, for Labour Day, workers leave everything they are working on so they can prepare some meat. Only question is: how to prepare it?
Latest film directed by Pjer Žalica begins in this atmosphere, but then, Special Police Forces, arrests one of the neighbours and all the plans go in different direction. In this way, Žalica combines old, bit archaic rituals with reality of post-war Bosnia and Herzegovina raising the question who we really are when we look under the furnish.
Fudo is arrested. He did, or not, commit a warm crime. If he did it, it might have, or not, been justified. At the table, at which the film begins, neighbourhood forum is discussing the situation. Žalica depicts a way in which little community function – everybody is there from people who seem not to belong, to wives who are punishing their husbands like little children. Is the place that the neighbourhood approved for you the one that you find the most comfortable, doesn’t matter, because when all the storms calm down, everybody stays in the silence of their own apartments, trying to fight the loneliness that made them turn to each other, in the first place.
Labour Day is a warm, simple film in which Pjer Žalica manages to polish his chosen style making a recording that could tell generations to come about the world that we live in now, using easy tone close to the audience.
