Versione inglese a cura del Master in Traduzione per il Cinema, la Televisione e l’Editoria Multimediale

Article by: Annagiulia Zoccarato

Translation by: Giulia Epiro, Chiara Mutti

The river Bojana and its natural reserve lie on the border between Albania and Montenegro. Here 16-year-old Mina, motherless, is forced to spend the holidays with her father Andrej. Every day the same story is repeated, the young girl lies on the beach or studies, until she meets Saša, an older kite-surfer whose girlfriend, Sonja, is a hippie nudist.

This is the very simple plot of Vetar (Wind), third film of young Serbian director Tamara Drakulić, who, after two road movies – one of those, Okean, was presented at the TFF in 2014 in the section “Onde” – lands this year with a feature film inspired by the story Kites by Ana Rodić. The resulting movie is closely related to the land where nature and landscape create a sort of time-space bubble in Mina’s life. She is a teenager who dreams of a luxury vacation in Tunisia and wears a fake tiara at parties. This is clearly not the ideal holiday she desires, as she feels stuck in a natural reserve reachable only by boat. She is also blunt, bored and quiet.  Nature’s harmony opposes to her disharmony. They seem to be victims of incommunicability, their silences are mirrored into laconic dialogues as eloquent landscapes magnify them. Images and views are indeed Vetar’s key strengths. The platonic love story between Mina and Saša and her relationships with other characters are just a hint, but the beauty of images compensate for what could be seen as a lack of plot.

The real protagonist, both visual and aural, is the wind – which is in fact the meaning of the title, carrying viewers among soft colours and still images. Drakulić lingers on the shots, her framing is refined and her movie seems “to run after the summer wind” with its light and delicate images. Vetar extends time, fascinates with its seducing colours and geometries and makes intimacy the real subject of the story. Images tell us more than words do, they are the key strength of this indolent, peculiar and extraordinarily fascinating coming-of-age movie.