Overwhelming pictures of the landscape. Magnificiently alien, threateningly uninhabited. A place to which people rarely stray. Occasionally, a figure emerges from the distance, then vanishes again, like a short-lived eruption. Such people remain foreign bodies. The young physician Mitya is one such incomer. The nonchalence with which he goes about his work makes is seem absurdly matter of course. He treats people who were struck by lightning or drank themselves into cardiac arrest. Patches up a young couple who inflicetd knife wounds on each other in a jealous rage. Even gives relief to a cow that gobbled up a table-cloth. His operating table is a vast slab of sloping stone over which the wind goes whistling. He appenrently drawns special powers from his hermitage in the steppe, from long days only rarely interrupted by visits from the policeman, that other outpost of civilisation. The visit from his intended bride seems like a short, sharp reminder of times long gone, of sensual bonds. She soon returns to her own world. He continues to settle in, apparently at one with himself and the rhythm of his environment. But there is a vague sense of menace, of something out there in the expances of the steppe, a lurking shadow that is coming closer. According to the director, he wanted to make a film about a happy person, and about how difficult it is to do one´s work well. The resultant film is a tale captured then moved to a diffentent location, like a boulder gone astray, as frozen testimony of remote times - those in the past and the future alike.

Ivan, once a well-known rock singer, is provoking trouble in a bar. Drunk in his wheelchair (he lost both legs in the Serbo-Croat war) he belts out a Serbian Chetnik propaganda song. Thanks to the influence of his fathers Izidor - a noted politician who was a dissident in the Tito era - Ivan never stays in prision for long. But then things go awry - a quick succession of events chaotically narrated in jumps, ellipses, and flashbacks. Izidor is being blackmailed by a former member of the Serbian state security, whose knowledge is a threat to the career of the Croatian nationalist with the unblemished vita. As the pressure mounts, Izidor is ready to use violance. Ivan flees the parental home and brings about a tragedy. A darkly pessimistic film about present-day Croatia´s ongoing struggle with the demons of the past and the distance to be covered before the country can take its place in a peaceful and democratic Europe. Stylistically bold and thematically courageous, the film gies off at any number of tangents as it keeps the exposures coming. But like in his feature debut TA DIVNA SPLITSKA NOC the director proves that his wilful, personal signature can only be an enrichment for Croatian film.