What was said about the film

• Stojan Pelko for Ekran magazine: Maciste & muta
• Anita Traversi for the newspaper Finance
• Jury at the Cottbus Film Festival of Young Eastern European Cinema
• Jury at the Turin Film Festival
• Uradni katalog filmskega festivala v Torinu
• Bruno Fornara for La Republicca
• Peter Holmes for the London Times Film Festival

Stojan Pelko for Ekran magazine:
Maciste & muta

»They love each other even though they always screw up something. They all wish for better human relationships but don't do anything to achieve it; on the contrary. This is a film about human flaws. About desire for love. A love tragedy.«

These are the words Jan Cvitkovič used in the interview for Ekran magazine to describe - his first film, Bread and Milk! When we watch his second feature film - Gravehopping - it seems as if his protagonists actively undertake the "improvement of human relationships", but flaws are for that so much more painful, wishes so much deadlier, tragedies so much bloodier. And the film … the film is simply astonishing. Astonishment is a feeling that tells you that you are dealing with an authentic artist who does not only know how to perceive fragments of time but also knows how to transform them into fragments of the medium through which he finds expression. It is not the adventures that astonish, but how what happened became a filmic event: not the escape of Sonja Savič through the vineyard, but rather how camera follows her just a breath away; not the final burial, but the way the image darkens. When Cvitkovič moved his research of Slovene everyday life from the "Tolmin paradise" down south to the Karst region, it might have seemed for a moment that this move further down the Soča river will bring colour and comedy. But Cvitkovič is an archaeologist: he knows, if anyone, that there are hidden traces of all kinds of suffering. And there is no place of suffering like this one, where soil is literally shot through with caves and proteuses, with foibas and phantasms? When Spanish distributors were looking for a motto which would capture the gist of the film, they couldn't have chosen better: "Everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die first." And this is what the film Gravehopping is all about. Do you really want to love each other? No problem, you'll just have to die first! Well, yes, it's worth a try. Anyone who tries this in Cvitkovič's film is rewarded: the grandfather finds love after recovering after a suicide attempt in a hospital room, Šuki and Ida both die in a sense, each in his and her own way, before they are reunited in love. After the burial scene, when soil starts to breathe in the rhythm of love sacrifice, or shall we better say groan with pain, we are on the territories of Antigona and Hamlet: the line between the living and the dead is blurred to make it possible for a far more fundamental border between the earth and the sky to open, between the laws that apply here and the law that applies there. The embrace of the crucified and the avenger links two worlds that literally bypass, jump over the earth surface: it is an embrace between her who has symbolically already been crucified and stamped deep into the ground, and him whose vision of his own funeral already lifts him high above the ground. Now they are both down there and at the same time as far away as possible from that common superficiality which did not allow them to breathe up on the ground. Apart from everything else, Cvitkovič's film is thus also a film about an underground rebellion against the clichés of mediocrity, about a guerrilla search of oases of loneliness and eyes of tornadoes, which are the only places where it is still possible for a glitter of sunlight on a face to reflect in the mirror you single-handedly and lovingly hold up to your companion through life and death. Gravehopping is underground.

One of the criteria of critical judgement of a film is also how many serious comparisons it allows. Burger's Ruins was the first film after quite some time that allowed serious discussions about how Jacques Rivette saw the relationship between theatre and film, what John Casavettes meant for the main actress role, and where the ghost of Lars von Trier crawls through the northern theatre experience. If such comparisons used to seem far-fetched and megalomaniac, the generation of Slovene directors, with their originality, local tone and author's traits, does not only allow them but almost demands them. Taking the placement into authors' circles of names as the first parameter of discussion, we were still in at a loss when thematic obsessions of Slovene authors needed to be placed into contemporary notional circles. Is there anybody in this country who dares to claim something about love as fatally as Kubrick? Is anybody so chased by the theme of revenge to be able to discuss it with von Trier or Eastwood? It is not about how articulate somebody talks about his or her work (this is where Cvitkovič set an extremely high threshold with Bread and Milk), it's what films alone tell us about these notions with their images. And here I dare claim that Gravehopping speaks with more self-confidence than any film in a long time in these parts. From this point of view the notion of violence imposes itself as the key notion of the film, or rather something that could be called a circle or even traffic of violence, to be more specific. It seems as if Cvitkovič believed that one cannot be violent without it showing somewhere: not only in physical traces of physical pain (scars, suffusion, bruises and wounds) and psychological traces of psychological pain (autistic numbness, brutal outbursts), but in almost a physical mass of violent energy that spreads virus-like from transmitter to receiver and from here immediately forward to the next link in this endless chain. If we enter this circle of violence with the dark figure of Renata's father, played by Vlado Novak, he can of course immediately be ascribed going as far as sexual abuse of his daughter. However, this load of violent energy is transferred from Renata to the main character Pero during the masochistic seance - whereby her words hurt possibly even more than his strokes with the belt. When Pero leaves the house, he literally takes away with him a part of this violence (one part still remains there, at home, painfully visible on Renata's bloodstained nose after self-mutilation with an ashtray) - but this part alone is so heavy that he has to throw it somewhere as soon as the first opportunity arises. And the sister's husband, although much taller and more than apparently stronger, is the first to come in handy as a kind of a testing ground for Pero for a new manoeuvre of this unstoppable "traffic of violence". If we trust Cvitkovič, we need to try and stop it where its source is: in the family. Namely, when the family, re-glued together again, drives home from the hospital where the husband recovered from a beating, a song on the radio in the car joins them in some kind of naive joy which is contagiously cute. We believe that the husband is really sorry for being such a stupid bastard. They love each other.

At first sight it might seem that Šuki is in the same position (his love was also violated - and this violence must also strike somewhere), but he is already fundamentally different: he strikes back, binds a chain into a circle, welds violence into a wheel. As his examples are much clearer (he finds inspiration in the film Maciste, the biggest hero in the world, a peplum from 1963 with Mark Forrest in the main role), his acts much more determined and traces of his violence more … dead bodies. When the wheel, whetted into a deadly weapon inspired by Ben-Hurian teams, speeds down the Karst road in full shot, we know that justice is going to win. That is why we can only be at the place of massacre post-festum, after the battle, because the sight of this "Fleisch machine" in full shot leaves no doubt that it is going to be bloody, very bloody.

There is something terrifyingly convincing in this wound up Fiat Cinquecento with wheels whet into a point, in this temptation of the village mechanic to follow the example of "the strongest man in the world" (as was the title of the second film from the Macisto series, two years before the already mentioned Macisto) to avenge the violation of love. Sean Penn in Mystic River and Nicole Kidman in Dogville both had all our sympathies when they decided to take justice into their own hands. Nicole could whisper "shoot them all" to Šuki and we would still say they are both completely right. But what if you have to take justice into your hands at the very moment when there is none of it left - when the so-called judges have discharged, depersonalized, eaten and drunk, consumed it all? Šuki's character fascinates exactly because with each and every one in Cvitkovič's film he is able to develop a relationship which is otherwise very difficult in the consumerism driven you-give-me-I-give-you-times. It is downright incredible how he is able to find contact with everybody without stopping to be what he is for even a moment: with Dedo, with Pero, with the diver, even with the psychotherapist …

The peak of his fine weaving of ties with people is of course his relationship with Ida. When she comes to his workshop for the first time in the film, it seems as if a shadow flickered or a light breeze breathed. It is only when warm sun lights and caresses her that she weaves the first thread of contact: with Šuki, but also with us, the viewers. The moment in which high up there under the ceiling her cheek catches the warmth of sunlight is the first moment in Cvitkovič's film which hints that we are dealing with something special: with a film in which energy does not go wasted but is accumulated and transmitted; with a film in which one can speak seriously and feel bodily; with a film in which even sky is not the limit for love. Sonja Savić is in this sense for Cvitkovič what Greena Rowlands is for Cassavetes or Ingrid Bergman for Rossellini: a face beyond the margins of a screen; a body stronger than physics; a form that is a picture, an image that is an era. Her silent body moves here and there as if in slow motion, occasionally twitches as if we jumped a few frames in the matrix technology of frozen movements. In one moment it seems that the tape is too fast for her, in the next she is faster than it. But also here, on a purely physical level of sequence and simultaneity of body and image movement it seems that we are on the track of a unique arrythmia, strikingly similar to disaccordance with commonsensical sloppiness. Sonja is at the same time under the ground and above it, but never simply on it, and likewise she is in front of the film and behind it, but never simply in it. The situation is so much more awkward for the character who loves her: how do you love an uncatchable silent icon and not become a greedy blind worshiper? Drago Milinovič did it with incredible gentleness which makes the final part of the film approach poetic realism of a Vigo's Atalante. If the polished deadly wheel is a symbol of the avenger, then the small mirror on the sun visor is a symbol of their poetic relationship - and director's poetic minimalism. How does a mechanic let know that he is ready to open a new chapter in his life? By opening space next to him to a loved person - and not only to her, but also to her as she sees herself. I don't want you to be as see you - I want you to be as you see yourself. His opening up of space for the image of another person in one's own most intimate space, in the cabin of oneselfness, is the ultimate gesture of love, is a sign of respect. Since that moment he will do anything for her, kill even - and she will be ready to go literally to the end of the world for him, all the way into death if needs be. When the small wound up Fiat Cinquecento is equipped with sharply welted wheels, Šuki is ready to face death. But when in the small wound up Fiat Cinquecento Šuki opens up space for another person with the mirror on the sun visor, together they are ready to face life. And that is why they win, here and there. And the ground breathes in her rhythm, groans in their pain. When they are dug out after a thousand years, they will be like that embraced couple from Pompei, preserved by volcanic ash and lava, that made Ingrid Bergman (in Rossellini's Journey to Italy) speechless from pain and almost faint when faced with such power of love.

When Pascal Quignard (in the collection of fragments Hatred of Music) in his rush of narcissism wished for silence at his own funeral, he couldn't have known that the greatest dedication to the muteness of death will be shot at the end of a loud and noisy sound film, where the ground breaths with it, the silent witness of love for another.

Anita Traversi for the newspaper Finance

About truthfulness of human existence

Bread and Milk (2001), the first film directed by Cvitkovič, convinced with truthfulness of its characters, openness and simplicity of filmic narrative, accuracy and self-confidence of film language. With its gentle verism the tragedy of the family from Tolmin brought into Slovene film the spirit of the lyrical of Italian neo-realism and the bitter taste of the Yugoslav Black Wave, two fundamental and influential film movements that never quite caught on in our film. However, Bread and Milk is much more than just an impeccable follower or belated contemporary of realistic classics from the middle of the 20th century. Cvitkovič added in the last scene a stunning author's contribution in which the organically and poetically rounded tragedy of his Tolmin family is hit by a kind of completely new, other reality - the one a man cannot completely comprehend neither with senses nor with common sense, but nevertheless knows that it exists and is real.

The world revealed in Gravehopping is entirely the world of this other, parallel reality of a human being that spreads between his outer and inner (psychic) reality and at the same time reaches beyond both. Film theory could easily define Cvitkovič's art as surrealist - that according to André Breton is without any commonsensical or moral constraints and particularly conventional notions about art, the source of its inspiration is revolutionary energy of the unconscious, dreams, hallucinations and sexual desire, and the main driving force free association of thoughts and images, the only means to achieve the "true real - the surreal". But Cvitkovič's surrealism with the elements of the miraculous that are incorporated into the lives of people in the small Karst village is on the verge of the magical.

Because he refused a classical structure of the story, where one event explains the previous one and leads to the next, and built each individual scene as a separate unit in which what happens stands on its own, Gravehopping speaks to the viewer through confrontations of opposites that meet in narrative ellipses : hell and heaven, violence and love, life and death, beauty and ghastliness walk hand in hand - everything as part of one whole, sometimes even of the same moment, but certainly of the same world. And this is where Cvitkovič's magic lies, this is the surreal of his filmic portraying of reality. It is also his boldness, madness and, last but not least, that universality that is bringing so much praise and so many awards to the film.

Gravehopping is not a film without flaws. However, because of the courage and self-confidence with which the film was made, and complete devotedness of everyone involved in the process, together with the director (actors, director of photography, set designers …), completeness of the work of art, these remain in the background. Several images and scenes in the last few minutes of the film remain in the first one: the one with Ida (Sonja Savić) on the meadow, when she says goodbye to the sun while the earth and the sky dance around her, the one from the funeral when Pero (Gregor Baković) is speechless for the first time, the blackness of the soil that buries beneath the white Fiat Cinquecento, the two loves, one embraced in the dark underground, the other merrily swinging up on the bell tower, and the golden light of late afternoon caught on film, the treetops …

The Jury at the Cottbus Film Festival of Young Eastern European Cinema

From beginning until end, from birth until death, from laughter until crying, from love until murder, this film takes us on a risky journey, demanding courage from its director as well as the viewer. It makes us look back at our own life experience and ask ourselves: are we actors in a comedy or drama? The film asks questions that are not easy, it makes us laugh in, without doubt, are serious moments - and does not lose its own balance as a whole but skilfully avoids all traps in this adventure. It relies on extremely good actors, witty dialogues full of absurd and pithy humour. According to one of the protagonists, this film does not say 'possibly', but goes on all the way until the bitter end, full of dramatic power and hope. The Jury unanimously awards Grand Prix for Best Film to the film Gravehopping, Slovenia.

Jury at the Turin Film Festival

GRAVEHOPPING receives the award because it makes you laugh, plays with death and in the end stabs you in the heart.

The official catalogue of the Turin Film Festival

Theatre of absurd which translates insecurities and values of the whole of humanity into black comedy. In his second film Cvitkovič revolutionarily transforms Balkan cinematography. The film is already a classic.

Bruno Fornara for La Republicca

The film is beautiful because it is the complete opposite of the films by Emir Kusturica.

Peter Holmes for the London Times Film Festival

Set in the idyllic Slovene Karst region, black comedy by Jan Cvitkovič opens with a quote by J.D. Salinger: 'When I was six I realized that god was everything and that made my hair stand on end.' His hero Pero makes his living with funeral speeches, while his father Dedo, still mourning after his wife died six years ago, keeps trying, innovatively but unsuccessfully, to kill himself. Pero's speeches are full of nonsense, euphemisms and fragments of personal psychology which vanish behind the heads of the bereaved. His neighbour Šuki, after seeing a film with Roman carriages, decides to inventively make and assemble blades on the wheels of his Fiat Cinquecento. The film philosophically faces life and death, heaven and hell, humorously approaches the chaos of life as well as inventively shows suppressed aggression that lies behind the usual façades or flares up with grotesque brutality which suddenly bursts out from the relaxing environment. Gregor Baković created a brilliant funeral role as Pero. All the other actors in this Cvitkovič's black and ironic portrait of human condition are absolutely self-confident.

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