A Brief Excursion (I) (2017) User Reviews

Complete nonsense!

[petar-kurschner · 1/10 · 24 October 2019]

I will NEVER understand why croatian "filmmakers" doesn't use their own beautiful country in a positive way?!! The locals from Istria are shown as some weird folks, as the locations where they shot this film (don't know how to call it, it is everything but a "film" or a "movie" it isn't even a documentary).

For such a story Istria has marvelous diverse locations all located very near, the locations used in this are boring to the bone. Lots of films "made in Croatia" are about war, about weird psycho people and the music in most of those films are having that melancholy feeling.

You have foreign productions coming from all over the world and use Croatia in the best way you can do and film marvelous movies because regarding locations you can have everything in Croatia in a split of a second. From France, Italy to USA, from marvelous architecture to crazy diverse nature, everything is near what filmmakers from Croatia obviously doesn't see .. a shame ..

Boring

[martin-k85 · 1/10 · 10 February 2022]

Such a boring movie, or documentary, I dont know what is this exactly... Entire movie people are just walking, and walking, and walking, nothing is happening, while some guy talks nonseses (and some curses, to make it more impressive) in the background... All that with some psychedelic music, here and there... I really dont figure how can someone watch this... Only good thing about this movie are scenes of beautiful landscape and villages in Croatia.

Showing a lot of the film maker's potential in several nice touches, making the movie much more interesting than the basic story suggests

[JvH48 · 8/10 · 29 September 2018]

Saw this at the Rotterdam Film Festival (IFFR) 2017. A proverbial knock out competition, like Agatha Christie's book And Then There Were None (aka Ten Little Ni**ers), but without anyone being murdered and with everyone still standing afterwards. Excursion members got detached from the group one by one, mostly following an impulse underway and staying behind for some reason or other. No one is forcing them in any way. We have no reason to believe that they are better off, or worse for that matter, than the rest of the group.

It is entertaining all the time, despite the unrefutably truth that nothing really out of the ordinary happens. It is very well possible that the landscapes were helpful in keeping our interest. Based on a novel by Antun Soljan (1932-1993) that was used as a framework, yet the actual story deviated more and more from it during filming. The structure is retained from the book, however. Part of the text is improvised, e.g. the scene with the cooler.

Most actors were personal friends, only Roko was a professional actor. After 21 days of shooting, the voice over became the most important part to bind it all together. It took quite a while to get it right. We often hear a wooden clarinet, a local instrument. Part of the dropouts underway are derived from the novel, while other were invented later. The carnival group is well known, also a local tradition.

All in all, given price/performance this movie is a great achievement (budget is probably minimal). It includes several nice touches, difficult to describe here. I would not be surprised when a second viewing would reveal many more niceties, but I can offer no proof for this assumption other than my belief that this film maker shows a lot of potential. The festival audience thought otherwise and rewarded it a lowly 101st place (out of 172).