Gravehopping

This Slovenian/Croatian movie starts like a comedy. You come to think a little about the great Czech tradition from the late 60s. The funeral speeches are fun, the father's suicide attempts are fun and so is the shy love history between the hero and the girl.

But without you really noticing, it becomes a rather brutal tragedy and the happy microcosms of this little village is destroyed.

The problem is that you can't really believe neither in the happiness or the opposite for these people, even if they are well acted. An interesting film, which doesn't arise your passions as a watcher. Life and death are mixed, but not in your mind.

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

-Jury at the Turin Film Festival, 2005

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

-The official catalogue of the Turin Film Festival, 2005

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

-Bruno Fornara for La Republicca

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.

• Peter Holmes for the London Times Film Festival

I highly appreciate European low-budget films that tell interesting stories. I don't think this one does, though. I find it way over too slow,

I think the characters are not deep enough and the story is hardly found, without reaching the lyricism it suggested from the comments

I had read. It looked promising but I found only one (maybe two) surprising

moments and I don't know if it is worth waiting for it. The whole

philosophy of the movie, apart from the obvious presence of death as something

no one can avoid, seems to be that sex drives all human behavior. It's an

opinion that I respect but the way to tell it could have been much richer.

Excellent movie about.. well.. uhm.. a guy who earns his living by doing funeral speeches, a suicidal and widowed father and a sister and her kid who really miss their man/father. And then there's another sister who's really quite a few fries short of a happy meal and a quiet but cheerful neighbor.

A typical tragic comedy, East-European style? Perhaps... but an endearing and surprisingly dark one too.

Plot-wise: wow.. it's a well balanced set of interacting stories, with intelligent and witty dialogues and scenes. It's also very brutal in its sadness, the final scene really took my breath away and I immediately checked the audience's reaction which was very similar.

Conclusion: A cynic would call this a cynical feel-good movie and I'd agree. I loved its ups and downs of happy and sad moments and characters. Very beautiful. A real Gem if you can find it!