"Dobro jutro!" is a feature documentary by Ante Babaja, one of the grand masters of Croatian cinematography. The director, screenwriter, and producer is depicted in an old folks retirement home. Using modern digital film technology to record the place where he lives and his everyday life, the film shows the facility's everyday routine. He wakes up when a nurse knocks on the door saying "Good morning", eats breakfast, visits a doctor, and rests in the afternoon. Everything is presented to us from Babaja's personal philosophic perspective--scenes from his private and professional life are mixed with those from the facility.
Ante Babaja's last film is a personal story about himself. He received a Sony camera as a gift and started to film things that happen in his retirement home every day, where he lives after two strokes and two cardiac arrests. While filming he decided to add to his reality some inserts from his favourite and most popular films such as "Breza" (1967) and "Izglubljeni zavičaj" (1980). In "Dobro jutro!" we see Babaja himself on the screen and the 80 year-old director's self-observation delivers something between a film legacy and a document of our times. It's a thoughtful study of life with quietly humorous undertones, a solemn depiction of growing old, a meditation on the transience of life, and of faith. "Dobro jutro!" is a very honest and hard story about being old, and the passage of time.
He was born the 6th of October, 1927 in Imotski, and studied economics and law while assisting many directors in Paris and Zagreb. His flms are meditative and cultivated. He founded and worked as a professor at the Academy of Theater, Film and TV in Zagreb. His most famous films are like movie screenings of literary works. He said, "Film has, for me, since the first day that I have been aware of it, always been art. Film as art, this is something that I have always emphasized. Naturally, film exists in a hundred different ways, but I am only interested in this one--film as art." About the documentary he said, "The primary thing always is to create the concept. Without establishing the concept, I'm incapable of shooting anything and due to my limited mobility and the fact that I am living in a retirement home I captured the world that surrounds me. In the scenes I inserted short fragments from my previous movies." "Dobro jutro!" translates as "Good Morning!". Ante Babaja wrote the script, directed, and was cameraman along with Goran Trbuljak and Tomislav Jagec. The runtime is 85 minutes. In Croatian.
