Woman In A Landscape (1989)

Woman in a Landscape (Zena sa krajolikom)
(Ivica Matic, Yugoslavia , 1976)
68 m, subtitles
16 mm colour


A self-taught naive painter attracts the attention of a local married woman. Their liaison upsets the balance of their community and puts them into conflict with their neighbours. A beautifully shot film with great feeling for painting and the surrounding landscape.
This pastoral drama celebrates the dedication and courage of a man wholly given over to painting and art. In the story, a forestry worker (Stole Arandelovic) is transferred to a small village in Bosnia, and is seen to be constantly busy with some form of artwork. He even asks for women to model nude for him. This odd activity at first leads the suspicious villagers to attempt to torment him by desecrating his canvases, but he endures this period, marries a local woman, and dies prematurely. In an uncanny fashion, the director Ivica Matic's life mirrors this, his only film, in that he died unexpectedly in his late twenties, only a few days after the last scene was shot in 1976. It was compiled and edited for release by a group of his friends in the late 1980s.