WHAT A COUNTRY!

Three Croatian public servants, three events. Stalked by suicidal ideation, a highly decorated general struggles with his death wish. The interior minister locks himself inside a prison cell and refuses to come out. A gang of old men steal the coffin of the nation’s first president, Franjo Tuđman. While the incidents’ backstories and points of intersection at first seem random, the plotlines soon grow more tightly entwined. The Croatian state apparatus is confronted with a virtually endless supply of seemingly insurmountable obstacles, reaching all the way to the president himself, until the top dogs are obliged to get their own hands dirty too. With dry humour and moments ranging from the absurd to the surreal, WHAT A COUNTRY! tackles those painful subjects of the national past that continue to echo into the present day, in a manner that proves both entertaining and profound. The aftereffects of the Yugoslav Civil War, both for society as a whole and on the individual level, are the driving force behind the film’s escalating events.