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2000.
21

PORTRAIT

A Collage Portrait: Zrinko Ogresta

Zrinko Ogresta’s filmic reality is full of warmth toward the image, and especially toward the film hero who appears to be painfully real, since Ogresta does deal with serious and difficult subjects, various problems with the psyches of individuals and social conditioning. Led by the principle of »less is more«, Ogresta focuses on the feelings of the hero, and this reduction of feelings consists of the minimizing of the expressed emotions of the character, in his shutting himself up within himself. These characteristics were already evident in the protagonists of his academic films (Emergency Exit and Would You Like Some Tea?), and they can be identified at the dramaturgic foundation for his feature trilogy (Shards, Washed Out, Red Dust). Ogresta does not direct easily likeable films. He seems to adore the gloomy tones with which he suggest loneliness, sorrow, abandonment...

If we look chronologically, and if we accept his three feature films as a trilogy, it is interesting to observe that in his second film (Washed Out), Ogresta speaks about the present of pressured individuals, while in his first film (Shards) and his third (Red Dust), he encompasses a broader timeframe of several years in which he throws in facts that are not directly relevant to the life of his hero, but that do however exert an influence on him. In the process of creating a linear social dramaturgy that incorporates a broad period of time, the director offers a hermetic variety of events that can be easily recognized on a global scale, and that, when delved into deeper, open up numerous issues.

More accurately, after he completed his registration of Jagoda’s (Washed Out) mental state, his interest became more focused on finding the social context which produced Jagoda herself, and which was inherited from Shards. In this sense, we can speak globally about a trilogy which, when compared to the remainder of Croatian feature films in the nineties, is the most contemporary and most complex witness to our national identity.



Jasna Posarić

Zrinko Ogresta: Biography and Filmography

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