DIKOJE POLJE

Overwhelming pictures of a landscape. Magnificently alien, threateningly uninhabited. A place to which people rarely stray. Occasionally, a figure emerges from the distance, then vanishes again, like a short-lived eruption. Such people remain foreign bodies.

The young physician Mitva is one such incomer. The nonchalance with which he goes about his work makes it seem absurdly matter of course. He treats people who were struck by lightning or drank themselves into cardiac arrest. Patches up a young couple who inflicted knife wounds on each other in a jealous rage. Even gives relief to a cow that gobbled up a table-cloth.

His operating table is a vast slab of sloping stone over which the wind goes whistling. He apparently draws special powers from this hermitage in the steppe, from long days only rarely interrupted by visits from the policeman, that other outpost of civilisation.

The visit from his intended bride seems like a short, sharp reminder of times long gone, of sensual bonds. She soon returns to her own world. He continues to settle in, apparently at one with himself and the rhythm of his environment. But there is a vague sense of menace, of something out there in the expanses of the steppe, a lurking shadow that is coming closer.

According to the director, he wanted to make a film about a happy person, and about how difficult it is to do one’s work well. The resultant film is a tale captured then moved to a different location, like a boulder gone astray, as frozen testimony of remote times – those in the past and the future alike.