Sunday | 21. July. 2013

When film talks through images

Director Filip Peruzović on the film Coffee with Jam

Students are very often faced with the situation of a blank piece of paper that they have to fill up with their knowledge and ideas within a certain time limit. In the same way the director of the film Coffee with Jam had to deliver a short film on a subject of his choice on the fourth year of the Academy of Dramatic Art. He searched for the right story for a long time. The only thing he wanted to avoid was to use overworked monotonous interiors, especially the omnipresent kitchen, which is, due to modest production budgets, almost always the unfortunate destiny of student films.

However, it is not without reason that people say that dreams come true, because his search for the text was ended nearby, in an apartment he shares with his girlfriend, screenwriter Nikolina Bogdanović, who wrote the text in question long time ago, working on a college assignment.  Thus a happy combination of the director and the screenplay eventually ended up in the kitchen, where the action of this five-minute film takes place. The strongest magnet for the film was a story without any text, relying on the metaphoric mimics and gestures of a romantic couple (played by Katarina Bistrović-Darvaš and Damir Klemenić), that sits at the table having breakfast, while one wrong hand move, although up to that point they are perfectly synchronized in terms of their movements, leads to a chaos and an unexpected resolution of the plot.

The director’s work was further spiced up with a very simple situation of a couple having breakfast in the kitchen, which, due to the planned stylization, bears a note of abstraction and detaches itself from the real. However, it should be understandable to everyone, to those who are seven and seventy-seven alike. Editing is an important element of the overall process too. The director worked on achieving the rhythm of the story and character movement. The finishing touch was the harmonization of colours that are warm at the beginning only to completely fade towards the end, in accordance with the development of the chaos.

By Iva Cikojević