Milena is a middle-aged woman proudly running a successful household in an affluent suburb of Belgrade. During one of her daily cleaning sprees she finds an old VHS tape which exposes her husband’s involvement in a horrific war crime. Her dream existence gradually starts to fall apart.
This directorial debut by Serbian actress Mirjana Karanović examines the life of a woman who discovers that her husband was involved in war crimes during the 1990s conflict. Milena’s Vlada is an authoritative father and pillar of the local community, but he is also a patronising husband and the kind of man who respects women merely as efficient homemakers. The family home, however, starts to fall apart when Vlada stops communicating with his daughter, who doesn’t share his nationalistic views. A Good Wife is not a film about war; it’s a story about families, Milena’s own and the many like hers in the neighbourhood. In each of them is a devoted wife who is willing to sacrifice everything for her husband; above all, she knows how to keep silent. Karanović isn’t seeking to depict ostentatious dramatic conflicts; instead the pivot of the film is her own face, which reflects the gradual loss of family certainties and accompanies the viewer through the story like a slowly but irrevocably changing landscape. Although small in scale, the drama bears witness to society as a whole as it takes in the actions of a single woman.
Nikola Paggio
94 min / Color, DCP
Director Mirjana Karanović
/ Screenplay Mirjana Karanović, Stevan Filipović, Darko Lungulov
/ Dir. of Photography Erol Zubčević
/ Music Dejan Pejović
/ Editor Lazar Predojev
/ Producer Snezana Penev
/ Production This and That Productions
/ Coproduction Deblokada, Nukleus film
/ Cast Mirjana Karanović, Boris Isaković, Bojan Navojec
/ Sales Films Boutique
Mirjana Karanović (b. 1957, Belgrade), a leading Serbian actress, has more than forty film roles to her name. She is familiar from movies such as Emir Kusturica’s When Father Was Away on Business (1985) and Jasmila Žbanić’s Grbavica: The Land of My Dreams (2006), for which she received accolades at numerous fests and was also nominated for a European Film Award. A Good Wife is the first film for which she takes the lead role, directs and writes. She was inspired by real events – in 1995 a special Serbian police unit executed several Bosniaks and a video of the killing subsequently leaked into the public domain. She doesn’t attempt to analyse the crime committed against the civil population, focusing more on the dysfunctional families of those who perpetrated it. In 2008 Karanović took the Winning Freedom Award for her efforts to promote the principles of human rights. A Good Wife was premiered this year at Sundance.
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Mirjana Karanović
Actress, Film Director
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