"Intro" is not much of a narrative as it is an invocation of a feeling, a fleeting memory of a time that's gone by. Being that it is the first project of a yet non-acclaimed student director, I would excuse its technical imperfections and occasional plot holes, and focus on the sheer emotion it produces. He has made something that basically comes off as a long, scattered memory, and it's a beautiful yet disturbing feeling.
The story is set in the turbulent beginning of the nineties, a period coated in war atrocities in the Balkans. It radiates an overwhelming grim austerity and darkness that sealed the mind-sets of a whole generation of children and youth, including the director, including myself. But unlike other films that dabble with the Balkans during wartime, it focuses on another - but not any less affected – segment of life. The film simply looks at one story as it unfolds, refusing to supply reasons or represent an ideology, to dwell into the tragedy of the Balkan war and assign blame, but through its atmosphere it simply delivers the inescapable and depressing picture of adolescent life in the time that all of us who grew up in the Balkans during the nineties are very well aware of.
The main character and his friends wander nondescript streets of a miserable, life-drained coastal town, decaying industrial areas, trying to make use of their time – all in a way that gives the sense that they've been there too long; he wants to get out of that place but is trapped, thus seeing the only solution in joining the military. The pivot point in the film is the introduction of the leitmotif, "Insieme", a 1992 cheesy tune that in a way represents one of the anthems of the nineties' period, a song that sounds so unburdened that it paradoxically throws an even deeper shadow onto the brokenness we faced in our god- forsaken part of the world at the time.
The deep focus shots give the viewer a sense of reality; we are less manipulated by the narrative and freer to just read the set of shots in front of us, to live through them. His visual strategy doesn't try to tell us anything, and throughout its approximately 30-minute run time and low-key style, the film simply lets us feel the bleak pointlessness of the period. Yet again, while other films on this topic pass judgement and tell us to forget and repress, despite the bleak atmosphere, "Intro" presents the bleak nineties with an overwhelming feeling of nostalgia. This ambivalent and melancholy view of the past is a common disease of all millennials.
Apart from this paradoxical mix of emotions it evokes, the idiosyncratic mise-en-scene composition the director chooses shows a lot of potential, and indicates that this might be a beginning of a very promising film career.