Bosnian writer-director Una Gunjak’s first feature Excursion is an out-of-competition gala screening at Sarajevo Film Festival, having made its world premiere at Locarno earlier this summer.
Excursion is set in Sarajevo, where a 15-year-old girl seeking validation, claims she had sex for the first time during a game of “truth or dare” among middle schoolers. Trapped in her own lie, she invents a pregnancy and becomes the centre of a controversy that spirals out of control.
Gunjak’s short film The Chicken won the best short film prize at the European Film Awards in 2014. Her short Salamat From Germany premiered in Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes in 2017.
Excursion is produced by Sarajevo-based Pro.ba and co-produced by Croatia’s Nukleus Film and Serbia’s Baš Čelik. International sales are handled by Salaud Morisset.
How did you come up with this story and why did you decide to tell it?
In 2014, there was a case of middle-school girls who went on an excursion and, according to the gossip at the time, seven of them returned pregnant. Now, I wasn’t interested in this case per se and if it was true, I was interested in the society’s reaction. It was the way people discussed these kids, like they were sluts, there were all these horrible comments on news portals and social media, there were gynaecologists invited on TV to debate whose fault it was… And nobody was saying, are we going to deny the fact that these young adults are becoming sexual beings?
The second thing is, I was aware of what kind of environment they’re living in here in the Balkans, but particularly in Bosnia. On the one hand, you have an extremely dogmatic approach to denial of nascent sexuality, especially with girls, and on the other, there is an omnipresent hyper-sexualisation of women both in the mainstream and social media. And these are teenagers. The essence of what they are in that moment is really super complicated, and they’re trying to figure out who they are and what they are. It’s a deeply patriarchal society where girls are always more guilty than boys in these situations.
How did you work with your producer on developing and financing the film?
I’ve known Amra Bakšić Čamo and Adis Djapo of Pro.ba for 20 years and I’ve always worked with her. We were previously developing another feature project at Cannes Cinefondation and at Torino Film Lab, and it was a very complicated financing structure that was taking a long time. So we decided to go on with Excursion. We started working on it in 2019 and we wanted to finance it very quickly and shoot. And then the project started growing when we got the Hubert Bals Fund support. Later we got funding from national film centres in Bosnia, Croatia, Serbia, Sorfond in Norway, Doha Film Institute and Eurimages.
It was important for me to keep working with people I was close to, including Siniša Juričić of Croatia’s Nukleus Film and our sales agent, Salaud Morriset, which is also a co-producer on this film. I worked with Jelena Mitrović of Serbia’s Baš Čelik for the first time but we had long been friends. And I had the need to really do this on my own as a creative process, I wanted to be able to surprise myself, to allow my subconscious to work and allow things to happen at the shooting itself.
How did you cast the actors and work with them? What were the biggest challenges?
I adore actors and casting but as we first started before Covid and continued during the pandemic, it was a long and multi-pronged process. It was difficult with the teenagers, they change in three months and lose those baby features, so we had to cast again and again when the shooting was postponed.
But I was astonished with their creativity when they were sending in the casting tapes: they would employ a brother or sister to play a waiter, they would set up lights and music… These were proper little films! It took us a long time to find the actress for Iman, but as soon as I saw Asja Zara Lagumdžija, I knew it was her. It was very much clear that she was just able to make a scene come alive.
I worked with young children before and with them you can play, they forget it’s a film, but teenagers are very self-conscious so it was much more difficult. But it was also beautiful as it’s an ensemble piece, you work with all of them together and they build trust between each other and with you as the director.
The film is set in Sarajevo but there are no obvious landmarks to identify it until the very end.
I wanted to get away from the symbolism of Sarajevo which is very strong, and this is a story that could just as well happen in Mostar or in Belgrade. Also, I wanted to show kids whose parents are maybe not able to afford a flat in the city centre or those prestigious schools, kids who have to take a tram to go downtown. The neighbourhood where we shot, Malta, has these concrete apartment blocks that give it a very urban feel.
What do you want audiences to take away from the film?
I would like them to take away questions, to really think about this attitude and violence that we employ every day towards girls in particular. It is very systematic, structural, and it’s very accepted. This was really important for the entire register of the film, not to exaggerate and point a finger, because then you risk it becoming a caricature, and it can feel like this case is an exception, but it’s not. There’s always a tragedy waiting to happen, of someone getting hurt in these social circumstances. So I want the audiences to think about this, to pose these questions to themselves.
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