SFRY

105′, 1981.

DIRECTED BY

Vatroslav Mimica

PRODUCED BY

Neue Tele-Contact, Jadran Film, Avala Film

SCRIPTWRITER

Aleksandar Saša Petrović, Vatroslav Mimica

CINEMATOGRAPHER

Branko Ivatović

EDITED BY

Vesna Kroeber, Ute Albrecht

Autumn, 1388. The year before the Battle of Kosovo. Bands of robbers roam the southern border of the Serbian Empire. While Banović Strahinja, a young nobleman from the border area, is out hunting, his tower is attacked by the Turkish robber Alija. He kills all men and takes Strahinja’s young and beautiful wife Anđa away to the swamps. Strahinja asks his father-in-law, a powerful nobleman Jug Bogdan, for help, but is met with lack of understanding. For Anđa’s father and brothers, she is now a Turk’s mistress and does not exist anymore. But Strahinja’s love is stronger than beliefs and he heads off toward the swamps.

Vatroslav Mimica (1923) was a Croatian director. He studied at the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Zagreb. During the Second World War, he was a member of illegal SKOJ organization and a member of the partisan movement, and after the war he first worked as a film critic before he started his own career of a filmmaker. His film Prometheus of the Island (1965) won an award for the best film at the Pula Film Festival, while his film Monday or Tuesday (1966) brought him awards for the best film and best directing at Pula. In his films Peasant revolt of 1573 and The Falcon he showed a strong interest in topics of medieval social history and folk epic lore. He passed away in Zagreb in 2020.