previously published on Cineuropa
Life is not easy for a new kid on the block. At a certain age, moving seems like a total reset: with a new neighbourhood also comes a new school and the obligation to make new friends and fall in with a crowd that has already been there and shares a certain, established dynamic. Having a cause in common (or creating one) might help, but it might also drive a deeper rift between the kids’ and the adults’ worlds. This is something that we see in the new film by versatile Slovenian filmmaker Klemen Dvornik, Block 5, which premiered at Locarno, in the Locarno Kids sidebar, and is now screening at Sarajevo, in its Children's Programme.
Our protagonist, preteen girl Alma (Kaja Zabert), has just moved into a flat in a housing block in Ljubljana with her father, Filip (Marko Mandić, seen recently in Sonja Prosenc’s Family Therapy and Hanna Slak’s Not a Word). Life seems hard for her, since the same gang of skateboarding kids bullies her at school as well as in the neighbourhood. Once she finds out that her father is handling the development project that will turn the block playground, complete with its skating park, into a car park, she reaches out to them, so they all overcome their differences and form a pact to put a stop to it. Alma has a deeper personal reason to take part in this environmental project, since her mother died on such a mission in the Amazon. The adventure, which resembles a war game between the kids and the adults, begins, and along the way, animosities will be turned into friendships and a sense of community will be forged.
Working from a script written by Croatian-born, Ljubljana- and Prague-educated writer-filmmaker Dora Šustić, Dvornik demonstrates his versatility and eye for detail. Although they both occasionally rely on clichés, they manage to capture the life of kids and adults in a complex neighbourhood that is ethnically mixed and has class divisions, much like most of the estates on the outskirts of Ljubljana. Dvornik also shows he has a decent knowledge of contemporary young-adult culture, as he insists on TikTok-style interludes of vertical videos of their skating shenanigans set against a background of contemporary trap-pop music.
The director also knows how to work with young actors and newcomers, when to give them directions and when to step back so they can create their own interplay in an organic way. It results in great chemistry between them, with Kaja Zabert and Kaja Šuštar (who plays Alma’s nemesis-turned-best friend Luna) being standouts, while the rest of the young cast also fare pretty well. The adult cast members, except for Marko Mandić, reliably good in his role, have bit parts, and some of them, such as Ivana Roščić (playing Luna’s mother), Enes Bešlagić (playing a local kebab parlour owner) and Gregor Zorc (playing an unemployed man who wants to stick it to the system and therefore shows the most empathy for the kids’ venture), imbue their characters with life, while Tihomir Stanić (who plays Filip’s boss, Brabec) nails the vibe of the main villain.
Shot observantly by Czech DoP David Hofmann, who captures the details that could easily have been neglected by a cinematographer more familiar with the setting, scored by David Herceg to highlight the emotion in a discreet way, and edited vibrantly by Ivana Fumić, Block 5 is a film that should find fertile ground with elementary-school children, while also keeping their parents’ and teachers’ thoughts occupied for 80 minutes.