You Carry Me (Ivona Juka, 2015): Croatia, Slovenia, Serbia, Montenegro

Review by Zachary T. Parker. Viewed at the Santa Barbara Film Festival, 2016.

Stealing a few minutes of her time, I asked Ivona Juka, the director and writer of You Carry Me, what her process was to come up with the script. She told me she starts with her characters and that they are what make a film great. After watching the You Carry Me, I could not agree with her comments and her process more.

The narrative follows three different characters: 1) Dora (Helena Beljan), a teenage girl trying to save the life of her on again – off again father Vedran (Goran Hajduković) 2) Ives (Lana Baric) a hotheaded director taking care of her father Ivan (Vojislav Brajovic), who is suffering from dementia and finally 3) Natasha (Nataša Dorčić), a pregnant television producer who is suffering from an unnamed disease. These three characters are connected by coincidence, through a television show that Natasha and Ives are a part of and in which Dora’s mother works on. Events transpire from each character’s perspective and throughout the film we are given different versions of events we have been seeing.

To call it great writing would not nearly do the story of You Carry Me justice. It is, in every meaning of the term, a masterpiece that is carefully crafted and expertly executed. We connect to each character in different ways, feeling the weight of their struggles on our shoulders as we observe their lives, as powerless as they are in turning the tides that they seem to swim against. However, the camera work and directing is absolutely on par with the fantastic plot. Each character has a certain flow of camera work behind them, some more chaotic, some more slow and meticulous (adding silently to the feel of the characters, which again displays Ivona’s talents as a storyteller). Even when we come across scenes we have previously seen by way of another character’s story, they feel fresh and full of life, making the entire experience fly by far faster than what you would expect from it’s two and a half hour length.

Ivona was fighting her own battle in the very production of this film, both for funding and against expectations of what Croatian cinema is supposed to be. To Ivona’s dismay, most films produced in Croatia are about the war but with the country already living through it and finally beginning to recover from it, the country is fed up with telling stories about the war. So Ivona set out to create a very different film and one that would put Croatia on the map as cinematic country of merit. In this, she succeeds greatly as You Carry Me was one of the best, if not the best, film I saw the entire festival and it’s competition was not easy to beat.