Adria Blues

Toni Riff is an aging former rock star from Bosnia who left for Slovenia during the war and then married one of his fans, Sonia. Paralysed by depression, Toni hasn’t written a single song in the last two decades. As a result, he has to rely on the support of his wife who, to Toni’s irritation, earns a living as a phone-sex operator. When one of her regular clients, a big fan of Toni’s, offers to organise a come-back concert for him at his coastal hotel Adria, Sonia sees this as an opportunity to finally drag her husband out of his depression.... Adopting the necessary degree of detachment, Miroslav Mandić’s incisive tragicomedy examines the consequences of war in the former Yugoslavia. Unlike the host of films appearing over the past two decades which have regularly described the manifold atrocities of war, Adria Blues, in the filmmaker’s own words, looks at people whose lives were influenced by the conflict in a different way; individuals who, because of the war, abandoned any creative energy they had in them, losing all their illusions and ambitions in the process. (Karlovy Vary International Film Festival)