RHYTHM OF A CRIME

While many filmmakers in the Socialist Republics of Slovenia and Serbia within Tito’s Yugoslavia attempted outright rebellion against the worst excesses or simply against the internal entanglements of the dictator’s regime, in Croatia a group of film historians, critics and directors was searching for another way to be subversive: that of the genre form, as exemplified in the practice of diverse factions of the nouvelle vague in France. Soon these Croatians would be labelled Hičkokovci, “The Hitchcockians”. Zoran Tadić was however the only one among them who would go on to dedicate his cinema career to the crime film, developing a sort of “philosophie noire” on humanity in all its manic unpredictability out of the themes and topoi of the genre in the process. Nowhere else is his singular dialectic as evident as it is here, in this tale revolving around predictive statistics, murder and balance both in the world and between the living and the dead.