Safe Place

Fragile beings, such as we are, always need a place to hide, but when your entire environment, for your whole life, is a crude and alienating place, escaping that life might seem like the safest place where you can be kind. Juraj Lerotić exposes us to his emotional wound and weeping soul in his debut feature Safe Place (2022). After walking home with three prizes - for Best First Feature, Best Actor and Emerging Director; at the Locarno Film Festival, and two Hearts of Sarajevo, we managed to catch a screening of the film at the last Belgrade Auteur Film Festival.

The film opens with the following quote: “If none of this had happened, I could have told you: Look, this is your building, count to twenty, and I’ll come running into the scene.” After which we’re introduced to a bird’s - or if you prefer it, God’s - POV of a typical concrete building in a residential block. The muffled clamour of kids playing, and the sound of birds are calming. Everything appears normal, until a man furiously enters the frame passing by the kids, trying to force himself into the building with all his might, for what seems like an eternity. The sudden entrance, a way of running, and many tired unsuccessful tries, make for a kind of comedic effect. But then the shot holds and you immediately feel bad, because you just assumed something about a man you knew nothing about.

His name is Bruno (Juraj Lerotić) who, after receiving a call from his brother Damir (Goran Marković) after he had cut his wrists, he immediately ran to Damir’s apartment to check up on him. After breaking the apartment door, Bruno immediately called the police and ambulance, but instead of help, he was faced with a series of accusations and a suspicious line of questioning. Soon after, their mother comes to visit, after which it doesn’t take her and Bruno long to decide that the best course of action might be to take their loving Damir to their hometown of Split, where he would be dealt with more care.

You’re bound to feel some sort of fear and trepidation when dealing with a subject like this, but what is most touching about this film is the sheer amount of goodwill and effort Bruno is willing to put in for his brother. The opening quote, in a way, teases that something they won’t be able to walk away from is about to happen, while it also points towards their home — something that should be a safe palace. Even mentions of counting to 20 and running into the scene, feel like he’s talking about a game of “hide and seek”. As if trying to return and preserve the times when his brother was in a better place. But one wonders, were those times idyllic? Was the home really such a safe palace? Seeing the last picture taken fo Damir, before he moved to Zagreb and before his first suicide attempt, one could also say that everything seems fine, and yet a certain sadness keeps emanating from his eyes the longer you look at it. After a sheer will to move mountains for his brother, the only thing Bruno could realise is that Damir was tormented by inner demons so deep and veiled that there is a whole world inside Damir, to which he’s not privy to.

It should be noted that Juraj, the director, and the star of the film, drew heavily from his personal family tragedy of losing his bother due to suicide in making of this film, which is probably why he decided also star in the film as well. Although the film is very much a piece of transcendental cinema — with its long takes, stabile locked-off long shots (courtesy of Marko Brdar), the inclusion of non-actors, and even sudden sparks of the metaphysical; it doesn’t feel like it’s done out of a theoretical aesthetic pet peeve against action cinema. The transcendental nature of the film feels like an existential and therapeutic need, where it isn’t bogged down by pure aestheticism and is actually looking for the ultimate transcendent experience: trying to connect with something invisible, something lost.