‘Murina’ Director Antoneta Alamat Kusijanović Talks Fearless Filmmaking & Fearing The Sea [Interview]

Last year at Cannes, writer-director Antoneta Alamat Kusijanović won the Caméra d’Or for “Murina,” a tempestuous psychodrama set along Croatia’s shimmering Dalmatian coast. Now out in select U.S. theaters and expanding across July, the film follows 17-year-old Julija (Gracija Filipovic), whose deep-seated desire to flee her abusive father (Leon Lucev) and acquiescent mother (Danica Curcic) suddenly surges to the surface when a family friend (Cliff Curtis) comes to visit, offering her a rare chance to escape their remote-island abode. 

Filmed in and around the sparkling blue waters of the Adriatic, where Julija and her father often dive for eel, “Murina” luxuriates in the region’s vivid beauty, its rugged coastline, and sun-soaked beaches. But, in league with veteran French cinematographer Hélène Louvart (“Never Rarely Sometimes Always,” “The Lost Daughter”), the Dubrovnik-born Kusijanović also captures the intimate, sinister chill of its shadows, a sense of slow-brewing menace that settles over even the brightest scenes with a storm cloud’s negative charge.

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For Kusijanović, who resides in New York, it’s been overwhelming to watch “Murina” touch down stateside. Since its Cannes premiere, far more has changed than has stayed the same; asked recently over Zoom how this past year has been for her, Kusijanović simply throws up her hands in mock surrender. “It’s impossible for me to answer that only in a professional sense,” she says, laughing. 

That’s because the filmmaker was nine months pregnant at Cannes last year. And while she set up a few meetings and presented her film’s world premiere in the Directors’ Fortnight section, Kusijanović didn’t end up accepting the Camera d’Or in person. 

Instead, 12 hours before a call came in inviting her back to Cannes for awards, Kusijanović gave birth to her first child. Seized by the impulse to return to her home country for the delivery, she left Cannes early and drove 13 hours with her husband to a Croatian hospital. An hour after they arrived, her son, Petrus, was born. The next day, calls started pouring in: from friends, family, and the film industry. “I started working from the hospital and really never stopped,” Kusijanović admits. 

As evidence of this, her next feature — an English-language film about motherhood, co-written with Yinuo Wang (“90 Days”) — is already in the works, and Kusijanović writes scripts on trains these days while traveling to promote the release of “Murina” in various territories. 

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“The pressure [to keep moving] isn’t as emotional as it is logistical,” she says. “Just as it takes nine months to have a child grow within you, a movie takes a certain amount of time to make as well. It can’t be rushed. It can be financed quickly, but it can’t be directed or written quickly and still be as good as what we need to experience later on the screen. That, sometimes, is hard for people to perceive.”

Intimidating though this work ethic may be, it hasn’t failed her yet. Even before “Murina,” as soon as Kusijanović graduated from film school in 2017, she flew to Cannes, and — already riding the festival circuit with an award-winning short film, “Into the Blue” — met with no less than Martin Scorsese. Impressed by the short, he agreed to produce and finance “Murina.” Filming commenced two years later, on the same Croatian island where Kusijanović was raised.

The seeds of “Murina” seem to have been planted a particularly long time ago, for you, given that you grew up in Croatia and spent summers on an island in the Adriatic. The sea, especially, plays such a central role, so I wanted to start by asking about what it signifies to you, personally?

“Murina” does feel very personal, but the story is fictional and not so much a personal story. It’s interesting because my relationship with the ocean is not quite like in “Murina.” Filmmaking is about portraying contrasts, always, within yourself. I’m terrified of the water — truly terrified. I love the water, and I dived as a child. There was this little cave where I’d play with my dolls and dive under. But, now, I’m very scared of the water. I think that the more you know the sea, the more you’re afraid of it. 

People who don’t fear the sea can easily go in a boat and go across the ocean. My fear is tangible in the movie; for me, it’s about a relationship with the unknown, diving deeper into your subconscious, diving into the place where you can spill blood and exercise the heat of desires that are not permitted to you. It’s a place where you cannot say but you can show your true feelings. It’s like entering a space where both the environment and time are different. At times, the sea breaks down your thoughts in such a way that you can solve certain things before acting on the surface. That’s what is the sea to me, and I have that relationship to it still — but from the shallows.

You don’t need to dive so deep these days.

I don’t. Maybe I’m getting old. Well, it can’t be age, because I’m not getting that much older. I think it’s knowledge: truly knowing and experiencing things. I’ve been through many storms, not in the dark but inside the storm. It’s not only about physical fear, for life or death, what you feel. It shakes up something within you when you’re experiencing that, which is exciting.

To make “Murina,” you filmed underwater. It strikes me that there must be no better way to conquer your fear than to bring a camera down there with you.

It’s so true! You need to expose yourself in such a way to make a movie. Feeling that you’re too familiar or comfortable brings out nothing. 

In those underwater sequences, as well, you’re conveying crucial dramatic beats. The ocean is a place of refuge but also rebirth for Julija, and it’s where the boundaries of power and control between her and Ante are ultimately renegotiated. 

I don’t believe you should ever plunge the camera underwater for the sake of having a shot underwater. If there’s no physical drama, there’s no need to be underwater. It’s difficult, it’s dangerous, and it doesn’t look that good. To go there, it needs to be a scene with wants, needs, conflicts, and resolution. Otherwise, there’s no need, just as above the surface. You should not shoot a scene that doesn’t have an arc.

More broadly, the Dalmatian coast has this postcard quality — which is exposed as a veneer as you reveal the realities of characters forced to live there. How did you and DP Hélene Louvart draw out a sense of darkness from the setting, especially given the abundance of natural light you had at your disposal?

We had to get very creative with very few tools, basically. We could not bring the light with us. It was all natural light, so we had to work with what was there. That’s always a challenge, but it’s also a constant source of inspiration. I wanted to be in a place with no trees, to feel that my characters were exposed, with no shade and nowhere to hide. Of course, we did not want to make a postcard. We wanted to seduce the audience into thinking they are in a utopia, as every utopia ends in true darkness. It’s not a holiday. 

Hélene would always say, “Ce n’est pas la jolie campagne.” It’s not the pretty countryside. These characters are living a hard life. To mistake it for a pretty countryside would be a sin. From those parameters, we were following characters and building claustrophobia, which comes from emotion, and emotions are defined by your space, so that all worked together, until we arrived at a place where you could shoot it only one single way.

The family dynamic in “Murina” is fascinating, this push-and-pull Julija feels between her father, Ante, and mother, Nela. I admired your approach to those relationships, and in particular the ambiguous extent of Ante’s abuse toward Nela and Julija. It’s clear violence is being inflicted, but we don’t see it all directly. Tell me about shaping that side of the narrative.

It’s very important for me not to say what I already show through body language. They’re definitely speaking, just sometimes not with words. And then there’s the dialogue of a camera, which shows certain things the characters are unaware of. 

I had to be careful not to underline it because everything on the big screen in this type of story can feel too loud. My voice has been thinned at times when I wanted to roar because it almost would have been too much to watch. This story has been adjusted to the screen; in reality, it’s much louder. These characters have not been exaggerated. They have been toned down for the screen. 

As proof of that, it’s often been commented by Croatian audiences, “What is it that actually happens in this film? It’s just a regular family.” These are the people I made the film for: those who think it’s a regular family, and that nothing happens.

“Murina” has been called a “coming-of-age” film. Is that how you approached the story, given Julija’s efforts to break free of her parents?

People often call it a “coming-of-age” story or a “feminist” film. All of these are hashtags that you attribute to a film once it’s done. When I was making the movie, I was not thinking about how we would show Julija coming of age or how it was going to be a feminist film. I was making a film from a few strong premises: that these people needed freedom. That they couldn’t express it, some of them physically and some of them emotionally. And that they were in the chains of their emotions and psychologies, confronting things that are invisible but ingrained so deeply. 

It is coming of age, but it’s not a coming of age for Julija alone. Everyone is coming of age, even if that age is 30, 40, or 50. At these ages, you have to be an adult and tough it out, to assume responsibility for your actions, but the hormonal changes are equally strong — just more commonly dismissed and therefore more dangerous. For me, Julija is almost coming of age least of all, compared to everyone else. 

And it is a story about fear because all of these adults are afraid. And they are afraid of different things. I read today [a quote by Margaret Atwood:] that “men are afraid that women will laugh at them, and women are afraid that men will kill them.” I thought about “Murina” after I read that. It’s true. 

I first came across that quote in Gavin de Becker’s book “The Gift of Fear,” about trusting one’s intuition. As it was described there, fear is this survival tactic, a defense against a society that not only accepts but enforces these contrasts between genders. 

Yes, completely, and it made me think about how much Julija really crosses over what society has set for her. Men are not often afraid of being killed by women, especially not by daughters. In a way, today as I was turning this over, I could think of “Murina” as a step forward: that this sense of fear twists and changes. 

When Ante looks at Julija with this expression of fear during one climactic scene, late in “Murina,” I think it’s fair to say he suddenly sees her very differently. 

I did not want her to kill him. It would be too easy. It would be taking the male way out. I think that the threat of forgiveness is more powerful than revenge. Who wants to continue living with blood on their hands? Nobody. Well, some do, and we know that they do, but not this character — hopefully, at least. To renegotiate and reestablish power, but to forgive and move on, was very interesting for me to explore.

It’s so interesting that you say the response from Croatia was that nothing happens in “Murina,” especially given the escalation of its third act. 

I feel so heartbroken about certain ways that Croatia accepted this film.  And when I say heartbroken, I should also say my heart was melting from the beautiful responses I received as well, in so many emails from women who felt liberated by the film. But then there was this other extreme, such a strong polarity, where the anger was so intense and was locked in such an ego that it could not get over itself or communicate with an exterior world. It’s an agony to live like that, with no imagination and no creativity. It’s a true nightmare.

Also present in “Murina” is the question of how consciously the characters uphold the patriarchal structures they live in. The relationship between Julija and Nela is especially taut in exploring the question of how women of different generations feel about their roles in that structure and their ability to escape them.

That was fascinating to me. I’m in between generations. I do call myself a feminist, but I did not do so until recently. I grew up in a family of strong women, and there was no need to elevate [the subject.] But that changes the moment you step on set. There’s strong chauvinism in the mentality of some people. Isn’t it funny how there’s such a generational gap between me and someone who’s 55, or between me and someone who’s 17? My actress, Gracija Filipović, has such a clear idea of what is odd, what is strange, and why certain dynamics exist. In her generation, it was already so much more cultivated. She’s been raised by women like me, and another level of feminism has been grown through them. They elevate it, and it’s this incredible progression. My child is nine months old, but if I had given birth at 20, I’d have a 16-year-old daughter, and I’d be in that situation: how even I — open-minded, strong, and independent — am under the influence of a mentality I was raised in.

“Murina” opens July 8 in New York, at Metrograph, and July 15 in Los Angeles, at Laemmle, before expanding. The interview has been edited and condensed.