The Priest's Children

Synopsis

Motivated by desire for demographic renewal, Don Fabijan, a young priest on a Dalmatian island secretly starts puncturing all the packaged condoms before they are sold. He is soon joined by the local god-fearing newsstand salesman and the mad pharmacist, and they practically abolish all contraception on the island. However, after initial success, numerous weddings and new births, things become complicated. Finally, the bishop arrives to the island and the situation gets out of control.

Director's comment

The fact that Croatia is a predominantly Catholic country and the fact that the Catholic Church in Croatia is a dominant, governing institution, left me, as a director, with no other option but to make a film about it. The initiative of the pope Benedict XVI partially allowing the use of condoms has put me, completely blameless, in a position in which the local story I wanted to tell suddenly became a global one. Personally, I don't believe that there could be a better setting for such a story than the Balkanic Mediterranean I know best because I myself am a Balkanic-Medlterranean man who grew up in Sibenik, a small town on the Adriatic coast. The Balkanic-Mediterranean carries in itself a kind of fabular, emotional, visual madness which is equally convincing and real on one side, and extremely surreal on the other, while the Catholic church and its dogmas carry conflicts of veracity and manipulation, celibacy and sexuality, love for your fellow being and pedophilia, religion and hypocrisy ... I am sure that the spectator can recognize all these elements together in one movie and accept them as real only through the genre of comedy, folk-comedy, comedy full of film gags, comedy with vulgarity of the kind we find in a „commedia dell'arte". (Hasn't Bunuel used humour discourse for his surrealistic narration?)

However, the reality we are living in does not allow me to remain exclusively on comedy and that is why, in the second part of the movie, I had to add the elements of drama into the comical structure, at first imperceptibly and then more and more obviously. These little dramatic elements are the sign that the end of the movie will be marked by seriousness and tragedy. Simply because life is something without a strictly defined genre, the interlacing of comedy and tragedy.

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