Požari
A girl comes of age amid Podgorica’s summer fires, torn between duty, desire and escape.
Summer is burning. Ana, eighteen, is trapped in a house that feels already in flames — caught between her father Kosta’s suffocating control, her mother Mila’s guarded silence, and her dying grandmother, brought home to die in Ana’s bed. Denied her escape to handball training by the sea, Ana seeks freedom through the coach Marko, only to find her mother has reached him first. She turns to Bojan, a student whose promised escape brings a violent first experience. As her parents’ marriage collapses and her grandmother’s death nears, Ana must face a life she refuses to inherit — realizing, in a burning palm tree’s glow, that the question is not how to escape the fire, but how to face it.
Director's note
Fires is a film that emerges from silence — from a family’s unspoken longings, grief and shame that seep through the walls of a home. I was drawn to the fragile space where love and duty, tenderness and suffocation coexist. Ana grows up inside this silence, watching a world laid out before her while remaining unseen within it. Heat, tension and withheld glances shape her restlessness and push her toward rupture.
Though the film follows Ana, it is also the story of a family caught in inherited expectations. Each character longs for a different version of themselves — Kosta for another way of being a man, Mila for aliveness beyond routine, Ana for freedom and her own voice. Their longings differ but share one root: the wish to outgrow the role assigned to them.
The story is set in Podgorica, Montenegro, a city that burns every summer in fires set by arsonists who are never caught — yet life continues as if fire were simply routine. This collective numbness becomes the backdrop to Ana’s story: fire as both lived reality and metaphor for longing, destruction and transformation.
Shot in 2:1, the film uses controlled dolly and tracking movements to follow characters through the family house, where the camera itself becomes a pressure that never lets up. Ana is repeatedly framed within doorways and window frames, visually trapped between surfaces that confine her. A zoom lens links the intimate and the distant, creating the sense that characters are constantly watched.
Sound is built from crickets, wind, distant sirens and fire, with silence carrying equal weight. Instead of voice-over, Ana records phone voice memos — an intimate space for thoughts she cannot speak aloud at home.
Fires is, at heart, a coming-of-age story that becomes a story of maturing across generations — an attempt to break a cycle of repetition and confront everything we have inherited.
Screenwriter's note
Once, a family friend, meaning to compliment me, told my parents: "this daughter of yours is worth a male child." I smiled politely, keeping the offense to myself. In Montenegro it is not unusual, when praising a woman's ability, to call her "čoek-žena" (man-woman) — implying a worthy woman resembles a man — and there are cases of women having abortions, or being forced into them, upon learning they carried a female child. Years later, above all while writing the screenplay for the feature film Požari, I asked myself why. I could not understand why a man would be worth more than a woman, or vice versa, though historical, socio-political, cultural and psychological contexts offer certain answers.
In Požari, teenage Ana searches for answers to that question while wandering the labyrinth of family relationships, secrets and traumas passed down through generations. As fires surround her town, her dying grandmother comes to live in the family home, cared for mainly by Ana and her mother. The grandmother carries contempt for the female sex and for having no male grandchild — devaluing her daughter-in-law for having "given birth to a girl." Though the grandmother's words bear the mark of her era, and she herself was once forced to abandon a female baby in the snow, I did not intend to judge or forgive my ancestors, but to understand them — and my own parents' choices. The patriarchy that shaped both sexes has, I believe, simply taken a gentler form today, not changed in essence. Ana's father Kosta, realizing he is not the center of his family's lives, falls into cocaine dependency; her mother Mila searches for direction amid a failing marriage and an uncertain love affair. Ana must decide on university and sport, and above all whether she must forgive her father, mother, grandmother — or no one at all. She knows she is worth a "female child," and has the right to her own life, whether accepting or rejecting the inherited trauma we all carry, wherever we live.
Producer's note
FIRES is a coming-of-age story set in a Montenegrin summer of wildfires: eighteen-year-old Ana must care for her dying grandmother as the certainties of the adult world dissolve around her. "Hell is other people," says Sartre, and Grandma Anđa proves it, moving in with her old patriarchal rules as luggage. But what if we make our own hell? Amid her parents' mid-life crisis, growing up feels like suffocating, and her only way out is to burn.
Developed at EAVE Producers, Cottbus cocoPITCH, BRIFF Brussels Pitching and Cannes Producers on the Move, it is a debut for Nina Tratnik and lead actress Janja Ćetković. CODE BLUE affirms its DNA: revealing new talents, questioning gender equality.
Now in editing, the team is decisive: Goran Todorić for grading and VFX, Darko Spasovski for music. FIRES' identity needs a last step: the signature of talented collaborators, mirroring the fires within and around our characters. Where authoritarian and reactionary temptations answer fears born of economic crisis and global warming, FIRES can awaken audiences to the idea that change begins with oneself. We seek €36,000 in completion funding, an ambitious festival premiere and a sales agent to deliver it.
Profile
CODE BLUE works across fiction, documentary and hybrid formats. Selective and auteur-focused, it combines artistic commitment with international orientation, connecting Montenegro's locations and creative potential to European coproductions. A women-managed company in a patriarchal context, it promotes women's empowerment and gender equality.
Credits: Backyards (Ivan Salatić, Venice), All the Cities of the North (Dane Komljen, Locarno), Mamonga (Stefan Malešević, Karlovy Vary), Asymmetry (Maša Nešković), Once Upon a Family (Sead Šabotić, Beldocs) and Bleach (Kaltrina Krasniqi, in post).