Bread and Milk

Bread And Milk
Jan Cvitkovič, Slovenia, 2001, 68′

A raw yet tender poetically realist film about people seeking warmth and love but doing everything they can not to find it.

Ivan is released from the alcoholism treatment program a day early due to a doctors’ strike. He returns to his wife Sonja and sixteen-year-old son Robi. The first afternoon at home is spent in a pleasant atmosphere and Sonja’s hope for a brighter future. The next morning Sonja sends Ivan to the store to get bread and milk while she herself goes to clean up at a wealthier family.

On his way home Ivan meets Armand, a classmate from high school who has been working temporarily in Switzerland. Through the conversation at the bar it turns out that Armando once spent a night with Sonja, before she was with Ivan. This fact throws Ivan off track and he almost unknowingly drinks the first glass of brandy. This is the beginning of a tragic family love story.

“A certain scene made a strong impression on me at the time (I was 16 or 17 years old). A man, a family man whom I seemed to know, stood in the middle of the bar at three in the morning, completely drunk, with a plastic bag in his hand. At some point, it seemed to me that this man realized that he had destroyed his life. There was a loaf of bread and a liter of milk in the bag, which he dropped helplessly on the ground.

This scene stayed with me somewhere in my subconscious for many years, until I decided to make a film based on it. Namely, by adding one day before and one day after to that moment, that is, a little bit of the past and a little bit of the future.” – Jan Cvitkovič

Selected by young programmers in collaboration with the Slovenian Cinematheque.

After the screening, Jan Cvitkovič will have a talk with the young selectors.