2011 · short narrative film development and production dossier · film project
Croatian short drama tracing one night of memory, desire, and clashing romantic viewpoints.
Hrvatska kratka drama o jednoj noći sjećanja, žudnje i dva nepomirljiva pogleda na istu ljubav.
I still like the engine of this one. The picture runs backward while the voice runs forward, so the audience catches the narrator lying to himself in real time. Luka Rukavina and I wrote it, and by 2010 we had it packaged properly - crew named, budget built two ways, rights signed - and pointed at the Zagrebacke price 2 omnibus.
It did not get made. The trail ends on a budget file I was still editing in September 2011, not on a premiere. I will not dress that up: we built a shootable film and never got it through the funding gate. What survives is the package itself, which is honest proof that the unglamorous half of producing - the paperwork, the crew, a costed plan - was actually done. That craft of getting a project production-ready is the service I have run on everything since.
- Matija Radeljak
Last night (Sinoc) is a Croatian short drama built on one night between two young lovers, Silvio and Mateja. Its formal spine was the point, not the plot: the images run backward, against time, while the narrator's voice-over reconstructs the same night forward. The audience is left inside the gap between what happened and how the person telling it needs to remember it. That reverse-image-against-forward-voice structure was fixed early and survived every rewrite, which is what gave a small relationship piece a distinct authorial shape.
Development ran across three years and stayed disciplined the whole way. A first draft is dated 3 June 2008; the screenplay reached its third revision by 15 June 2010; and on 18 June 2010 both authors, Matija Radeljak and Luka Rukavina, signed declarations formalising the co-authorship rights. The film was packaged for the omnibus call Zagrebacke price 2. This was not a loose idea shopped around: a full crew was named and committed, with Luka Venturin producing and running the floor as UPM, Ranka Latinovic on camera, Mislav Muretic editing, Anamarija Vasicek on scenography and Zrinka Rogulj assisting direction, under the company LUMA FILM. The plan was a roughly fifteen-minute HD drama shot over ten days.
The budget work shows the same tension the film is about: ambition measured against what the money would actually allow. The workbook carried two scales at once, a full submission package at 314,711.25 HRK held against a stripped alternative of 28,927.50 HRK, so the film could bend to whatever financing closed. The plan mixed public, own and unpaid sources: 100,000 HRK requested from HAVC and 80,000 from the City of Zagreb, both still in preparation, against 81,800 HRK committed as volunteer labour and a further 52,911.25 HRK of own funds in preparation. A dated copy of the workbook from 20 September 2011 shows the numbers were still being maintained more than a year after the script locked.
The honest ending is that the film was never confirmed made. Its selection outcome is not documented, and the archive holds no evidence of a shoot, a selection, or press. What is left is the package itself. As a piece of the studio's record it proves the least visible and most necessary service in production: taking a private, formally ambitious script and building it out into something a crew could actually shoot, with revisions dated, rights signed, roles assigned and money planned to the last kuna, whether or not the green light ever came.
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