2014 · character-driven drama treatment package · feature film development
A 2014 feature-drama project follows Silvija through grief, isolation, and hard-won emotional maturity.
Igranofilmski projekt iz 2014.: Silvija kroz gubitak, samoću i teško stečenu zrelost.
I will not oversell this one. How to bury a dog is a 2014 development file, not a film. Silvija Dogan and I co-wrote it up to a treatment dated 15 October 2014, kept the scenario moving into November, and prepared the material for a development application. Then it did not go further into financing, and I am not going to invent a second act it never had.
I am keeping it in the portfolio because the writing reached real clarity, and because most of what a producer does is exactly this: get an idea to the point where it can be judged. This one was ready to be judged. It simply did not get the yes that turns a package into a production.
- Matija Radeljak
How to bury a dog is a feature-drama that lived, as far as the archive can prove, on the page. Its protagonist is Silvija, a forceful Zagreb producer in her early thirties who can absorb professional pressure but has no working method for grief. When her dog dies during a work stretch, the competence that runs her life stops holding, and the film follows her through isolation, a strained bond with Salvatore, and the slow, unglamorous work of rebuilding self-trust.
The development is dated and specific rather than vague. A full treatment (tretman.pdf) is fixed to 15 October 2014, co-authored by Silvija Dogan and Matija Radeljak, with a completed dramatic arc and a lead-character psychology that stays consistent across the synopsis, backstory, and screenplay files. A progress letter from 10 November 2014 records that scenario work continued past that draft, and a Croatian development-application package (including the HAVC application form) shows the material being pointed at institutional support rather than kept as a private exercise.
What the record does not contain is a financing decision, a greenlight, principal photography, or a release. There are no budget tables to cite and no press to quote. So this is not a story about a film that got made; it is a clean example of the development stage doing its actual job: taking an emotionally exact idea to the point where structure, character, and stakes are legible enough to submit and to argue for. The package reached that point. The money did not follow, and the honest version of the file stops there.
Related work: Last night