Željka Udovičić
Silent Wedding
Nunta mută
Director: Dino Mustafić
Summary
The film Silent Wedding is a black comedy produced in 2008. The narrative, which is full of Felliniesque moments draws on classics of Romanian literature like Ion Luca Caragiale, who was in his own right the father of theatre of the absurd. The film provides excellent inspiration for a stage adaptation. For the staging in Maribor, the screenplay was adapted by the renowned Croatian dramaturge Željka Udovičić.
The plot concentrates on a group of aspiring journalists travelling around Romania researching unusual events and supernatural phenomena in order to prepare reports and TV shows which they try to sell at the best possible price. Their journey takes them to a village where completely by chance they begin to uncover dark secrets. Mysterious clues take them to the distant year of 1953, the year when Stalin died, which had a fateful effect on the countries of the Eastern bloc. Sixty years ago in Romania, which was occupied by the Russian army, and more specifically in the village visited by the journalists, there once lived a plethora of colourful characters, peasants who still lived off the land. We follow their life and attempts to (unsuccessfully) revolt against the Communist ideology and the different vision of economic development enforced by the occupying regime. Despite all the typical problems that their families have, a boy and a girl decide to marry, and the whole village gets involved in the preparations. Just before the happy event, the news of the death of comrade Stalin, the Father of Nations, arrives. Seven days of mourning are declared, which naturally means that marriages are also forbidden. However, the heroes of our story do not give up. They decide to organise the planned celebrations anyway: in complete silence, so that the Russians do not discover them. Naturally, everything goes wrong and the ending is inevitable – and symbolic. The clash between two opposing worlds ends in tragedy, revealing the absurdity of life in communist Romania in the 1950s. The existential inability of the individual to revolt against the essential terror of an unforgiving system is presented wittily and comically through a picturesque portrayal of a remote province which is forced to pretend to be something which it is not.
Cast
Nenad Nešo TokalićBranko Jordan
Ksenija Mišič
Srdjan Grahovac
Mateja Pucko
Eva Kraš
Peter Ternovšek
Milada Kalezić
Miloš Battelino
Maša Žilavec
Nejc Ropret
Irena Varga
Irena Mihelič
Matija Stipanič
Bojan Maroševič
Mirjana Šajinović
Davor Herga
Viktor Meglič
Matevž Biber
Photo gallery
Photo: Damjan Švarc
Photo: Damjan Švarc
Photo: Damjan Švarc
Photo: Damjan Švarc
Photo: Damjan Švarc
Photo: Damjan Švarc
Photo: Damjan Švarc
Photo: Damjan Švarc
Photo: Damjan Švarc
Photo: Damjan Švarc
Photo: Damjan Švarc
Photo: Damjan Švarc
Photo: Damjan Švarc
Photo: Damjan Švarc
Photo: Damjan Švarc
