Monday evening, 24 August, at this year’s Rab Film Festival showed that the festival slogan ‘Truth Needs an Audience’ is more than just a message. The screenings of ‘Honey Bunny’ and ‘Yugo Goes to America’ drew capacity crowds, while the audience rewarded both film crews with ovations.
The Open-Air Cinema hosted a screening of ‘Honey Bunny’, directed by Igor Jelinović, a family drama driven by an inheritance dispute. At the centre of the story is Tonina, the owner of an accounting firm who, alongside her many business and family responsibilities, cares for her mother, who has dementia and limited mobility. A conflict with her younger sister Tajana erupts when Tonina secretly buys part of their family house on the island, even though the sisters had agreed to purchase it together.
The screening was attended by director Igor Jelinović and actor Leon Lučev, whom RAFF director Robert Tomić Zuber introduced to the audience after the film. They were greeted with enthusiastic applause.
Meanwhile, ‘Yugo Goes to America’, directed by Filip Grujić and Aleksa Borković, won over audiences at Murnau Cinema and Festival Square Pjaceta. The film follows three people born in Serbia in the 1990s as they travel more than 10,000 kilometres across 23 US states over the course of one summer, driving a Yugo from New York to Los Angeles.
Their adventure also tells the story of a small socialist car exported to the competitive America of the Reagan era in the 1980s. Thirty-three years after the last Yugo was imported into the United States, the filmmakers embarked on the journey of a lifetime to fulfil the car’s final wish. The film received an excellent response from the large audience, with laughter and cheers of approval heard several times during the screening.
Following the screening, directors Filip Grujić and Aleksa Borković joined Robert Tomić Zuber for a conversation about the making of the film, their journey across the American continent and the Yugo as a car that long ago transcended its original purpose to become a symbol of an era. They were pleasantly surprised by the warm reception from the Rab audience. ‘This is the eighth island festival where we have presented this film, but Rab is truly something special. Thank you, everyone,’ Grujić said, visibly moved.
Full cinemas, ovations and conversations that continued after the screenings marked one of the liveliest evenings of this year’s festival. On Monday at RAFF, the truth did not simply need an audience. It found one, as it has on so many evenings throughout the festival’s previous editions.
