Olmo Omerzu. When Haneke meets Lassie

01 December 2017

Czech Film

Olmo Omerzu. When Haneke meets Lassie

Czech Film

Olmo Omerzu. When Haneke meets Lassie

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Slovenian writer/director Olmo Omerzu (b. 1984) investigates family dynamics and the kinds of stories you can tell by deconstructing the concept of family. He made his first politically charged short at the age of 13 (Almir, 1998) and early on realised that he wanted to tell stories with images. In his first film, A Night Too Young (2011), the living room is set on fire in the very first shot, and in 2015 came his breakthrough with Family Film (premiered at San Sebastian) which shows an unseen combination of drama, satire, and uneasy suspense.

by Louise H. Johansen

You moved to Prague straight after high school in 2003 to study directing at FAMU. What was your first encounter with filmmaking?
At 13 I won a script competition at TV Slovenia. It was a rather political story, without me knowing it. It was about a Bosnian refugee kid from wartime Yugoslavia who gets adopted by a Slovenian family. He then realises that they are all vampires.

We didn't have a camera in my house, like many others did, so instead I started to draw comics for another 5-6-7 years, working with the Slovenian comics publication Stripburger. I was always more into film, but I guess this was an easy way for me to get to talk through pictures.
A Night Too Young, your graduation film from FAMU, is about a woman and two men. By some strange twist of fate, they invite two 12-year-old boys inside to join them as they get wasted on the first day of the new year. The boys witness a full-blown ménage a trois unfold in front of their eyes and young minds.
It was interesting to build this fake family. In some way, they are working as and pretending to be a family, and I was playing with their roles and reconstructing them. The story is about the adults crossing a line. But actually, the moral border becomes clear only in the presence of the kids. Even though they are only viewers, they are there detecting what is wrong with the adult world. which gives a totally different tension and meaning to the story.

In 2015 came your breakthrough with Family Film. It continues in the line of the debut, exploring the space and dynamics between children and grown-ups. Why is the family the perfect frame to tell a story, and why does the family dog get as much screen time as the father (Karel Roden)?
I read about this couple who went sailing. There was a storm, the boat capsized, and they lost the dog – which was found months later on a small island. This image was so interesting for me. Imagining this Robinson dog, alone, and imagining who the owners were, what kind of a story this was, and what kind of genre. I had this idea that it should be a family film, in a weird way, and I needed a really strong dramatic situation. And right when the viewer is curious to find out how this story will be resolved, we do a transition to the dog's story! I was interested in finding out if this experiment would work. In both films we were thinking about the family, but really how to deconstruct it – and rebuild it again.

Family Film has been tagged as "Haneke meets Lassie". Your sense of suspense is restrained and eerie. Where did you want to take your audience and where do you find your inspiration?
I like to flirt with melodrama. And at the same time, when I'm watching a film I like not to feel too cosy or comfortable, but that the film is gnawing at me and making me feel unheimlich or uneasy. In general, I was bored with the typical psychological films. Michael Haneke has invented this more sociological approach to topics that often are not possible to approach psychologically. I was also fascinated by The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (2005) by Cristi Puiu. As a viewer, I am interested in how a story is approached. How do you experience the situation around you – the filmmaker gives you a tool. In Haneke and Puiu's work I saw these tools in play, and no one was teaching this at film school.

What's next?
Winter Flies is a winter road movie about a 12-year-old runaway who is found in a car far away from home. The police start interrogating him, and he tells a story, unreal and yet real. But don't expect a typical social drama about what he is escaping from.

Born 1984, Ljubljana, Slovenia (former Yugoslavia). Graduated from FAMU in 2011 with A Night Too Young, which premiered at Berlinale Forum in 2012. Family Film (2015) premiered at San Sebastian; it was nominated for 2 Czech Film Academy Awards, and won the Fipresci Award for Best Film at Ljubljana IFF. Winter Flies is co-written by Petr Pýcha and produced by Jiří Konečný (endorfilm) in co-production with Slovakia, Slovenia and Poland. Its estimated release is February 2018.

 

Related films

Family Film

A husband and wife set sail across the ocean, leaving their two children at home to explore the freedom of being home alone. The boat goes under, and so does the familz. A dog, stuck on a desert island, is their only hope.

Director

Olmo Omerzu

Year

2015

Genre

Fiction

Related people

Olmo Omerzu

Director, Writer

Czech Film Center
division of the Czech Film Fund promoting Czech cinema worldwide

Email: info@filmcenter.cz
 

 

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