previously published on Cineuropa
Parenthood is certainly not a walk in the park. To make things more complicated, whether we are successful at raising children is not measurable, and there are no firm criteria to rely on when defining what good parenting means. Croatian cinematographer, filmmaker and father of three Silvestar Kolbas tries to figure this all out in his newest documentary Our Children. It premiered earlier this year at ZagrebDox and won the Golden Arena Award for Best Directing at Pula, and just had its international premiere in the documentary competition of the Sarajevo Film Festival.
A cinematographer by trade (he collaborated with Igor Mirković on most of his feature-length projects), Kolbas turned to documentary filmmaking more than 20 years ago. Throughout his feature-length body of work, his approach is highly personal and self-reflective. With his debut All About Eva (2003), he chronicled the effort and the pain his second wife Nataša went through in order to conceive a child through artificial insemination. In his subsequent one, War Reporter (2011), Kolbas dealt with his childhood memories, his first marriage with Irena and his career as a war reporter during the 1990s in an uncompromisingly autobiographical way. Our Children serves as a sort of spiritual sequel to both of those films, thematically more aligned with the first, but stylistically with the second, given that his inner thoughts and fears are communicated through his own voice-over.
Kolbas opens the film with a scene establishing the primary setting, namely the house in the town of Samobor, near Zagreb, where he lives with his family: his wife, their three children, a dog and a cat. But that family is not quite a typical one and each of the three children, whom we might remember from his previous documentaries, has a different background story. Jakov is his son from his first marriage, who grew up living with his mother and moved to live with his father and the new family in adulthood; Eva is Silvestar's and Nataša's only biological child; and Ante was adopted.
Given the differences between them regarding age (Jakov is much older than his younger siblings) and character (Jakov is depressed about stepping into adulthood, Ante starts behaving problematically in adolescence, and Eva, as the calmest and most centred one, cannot wait to leave the house for her studies abroad), the challenges get greater and greater for the whole family. Silvestar questions himself constantly, debating whether his delayed emotions could be read as cold distance driving the rift between him and the rest of the family, while Nataša is not too supportive of the idea that the whole thing should be shot as a documentary that would expose them all.
Apart from being a filmmaker, Kolbas here also serves as his own director of photography (there is some additional cinematography from other family members) and sound recordist. The material he brings to the film can be entirely defined as a load of home videos from different periods and of various technical qualities such as aspect ratio, resolution and lighting. Editor Denis Golenjak does heroic work to arrange all of that same-sourced but stylistically different material in a way that does not bother the viewer who gets involved with the story.
Telling his story in a frank manner (highlighted by expressing the wish for the film to be taken as an expression of love by his family), Kolbas manages to find the right balance between clarity and excitement, structuring his presentation in a unique way so that every child, every problem and preoccupation and every challenge for the parents gets its deserved time. Our Children becomes and remains a very sincere, emotionally charged documentary.