Prometheus from the island of Visevica (1964)

Mimica's first modernist feature film, Prometej s otoka Visevice (Prometheus from the Island of Visevice, 1965), tells the story of a Communist official, Martin, returning from the city where he works as a director of a company to the island where he was born for a ceremony to commemorate the Partisans, of which he was a member. As he travels back, a flood of memories returns to him. First they come in no particular order-an unexplained montage of arresting and sometimes disturbing images. Gradually, the story is pieced together to reveal what happened. After the war, Martin became a Party functionary, but meets opposition from the conservative islanders for his well-intentioned efforts to introduce electric lighting, with tension gradually turning to direct confrontation. All his efforts remain without support, everyone abandons him, his marriage falls apart, forcing him to eventually go back to the city in order to start a new life with the help of his ex-war comrade.
Despite an ending obviously tacked on in order to gain official approval, the film is a critique of the rigid Communist bureaucracy and its distance from the people while never losing sympathy for the individual humans involved in the Party. The film is also notable for its strong ethnographic approach, using local dialect and trying to accurately recreate the way of life of the islanders.