Fantasy is the debut feature film of Slovenian filmmaker Kukla Kersherović, who is also a well-known musician in her country. Fantasy premiered at the Locarno Film Festival and is part of this year’s SEEfest, where it screened on Monday at the Sunset Screening Room in West Hollywood. A coming-of-age tale, the three main characters are young women who behave like “tomboys” and seem to prefer sports and boxing to girlish interests. As such, Fantasy is in the vein of films by French director Céline Siamma and major works like Tomboy and Girlhood.
This is the story of three girlfriends living in housing-estate buildings on the outskirts of Ljubljana, testing daily their limits within a male-dominant social structure where young women are expected to be married off to any eligible man. The starkness of the concrete urban spaces seems as brittle as the societal norms. Their world is dominated by the huge Brutalist-style apartment complex of the sort found in Ljubljana, Slovenia and other Eastern European cities. Dressed in boyish grey hoodies and often wearing boxing gloves, each of the three young women has to contend with the male gaze and expectations about their lack of “normal” feminine submissive behavior. Their female relatives have little, if any, support for their independent attitudes and unwillingness to play the expected marriage game.
In such a concrete-weighted environment, the three seem to endure a rather ambitionless life. They seem mad at the world and rely on the comfort of each other’s company. From the start of the film, we see the willingness of the young women to use their tough fists against young men who often mock them. They keep training in boxing at local boxing gym, as if in a stubborn protest against parental and male expectations. Their home situations are far from happy. This very opening sequence, lit gloriously by the backdrop of Ljubljana, shows the three young women perched on concrete wall at sunset – as it to suggest the very constraints on the female body in this social milieu.
The story follows three “besties” in their early twenties who, at the start, all sport a uniform, tomboy attitude and speak the same local dialect that mixes Slovenian with other southern Slavic languages, but soon we discover their different personalities. Sina (Mina Milovanović) is from into completely into sports, especially boxing, and wants to embark on a career as a coach. She seems to be from Serbia. Jasna (Mia Skrbinac) is the most ambitious of the gang: she stays quiet and wants to keep the group together, but she also dreams of making something of her life elsewhere. It seems that Jasna is from Croatia.
Mihrije (Sarah Al Saleh) seems like the youngest one and from Albania. Her her primary goal is to avoid getting married to a man whom she does not know and who would be chosen by her parents. She knows what her older sister agreed to do in marrying a man from Sweden who she met online but has never seen in person – only to get away from the family. Their common sense of “otherness” is more than being from foreign ancestry. They just don’t fit into the “system” of the patriarchal rules of their neighborhood. They do not like the low-key, systemic racism they experience with Slovenian civil servants.
Their individual lives change once they meet a seemingly liberated, even slightly unhinged, transgender woman named Fantasy (Alina Juhart), to whom they all react differently. Mihrije is instantly intrigued by Fantasy and wants to be near her with vague romantic aspirations. In the story, she even runs away from home to avoid her meddling, but pregnant mother who Is trying to arrange a marriage for her fairly soon. She is so infatuated with Fantasy that she grabs her back pack and joins Fantasy on a bus trip to North Macedonia, where he is going to see his dying father. On the bus trip, she sees Fantasy’s actual I.D. and, clearly, he is still a man without any surgery. Fantasy dresses like a man in visiting Macedonian relatives, Fantasy introduces herself under her male given name, Filip. The relatives assume that Mihrije is the finance of Filip.
There is a kind of dream sequence in the night when Mihrije and Fantasy wander off into a large park with a fantastical building in the distance. There Fantasy takes out a large bottle of liquor and begins drinking. He convinces Mihfije to also drink and they seem to fall into a time warp where clothes come off and we are to assume some kind of intimacy occurs. In the morning, they awaken and wander back into the town to learn that Fantasy’s father has died and they join in the funeral proceedings. We have a typical Orthodox funeral and after it, the family gathers in the home for a meal of mourning. But at this point, Fantasy surprises his relatives by appearing in a glamorous white gown and all made-up to sing “Fantasy” – the hit song by Earth Wind and Fire. And what happens – everyone begins dancing, without judgment. After all this, Fantasy and Mihfije return to Ljubljana.
While the two were away, Sina falls for her married coach, Boris (Denis Porčič), and starts exploring her more feminine side, dressing in feminine clothes and doing her hair after getting compliments on her toned stomach muscles. We seem them in bed together but eventual she feels jilted by Boris when he avoids here at the local supermarket when he is out with his wife and children. Jasna is so tired of her passive-aggressive mother (Silvija Jovanović) who is always yelling at her and leaving their apartment a complete mess. In a frenzy she cuts off all her long blonde hair and with a shaven head announces her lack of interest in pleasing men. She has decided to go to France and take a jog on a cruise ship.
Back in her family apartment, Mihfije, who is only 17, is grounded by her parents and locked in her room, that she shares with her younger brother. Her father yells at her about bringing shame to the family by running off with a man/woman of dubious virtue for whom they have complete contempt. She starts wearing a kimino that was actually from Fantasy and styling her hair a bit better. Lost in a little dance of joy and memory, her younger brother comes in the bedroom and begins to video her dancing. She tricks her brother by grabbing his phone and returns it only in exchange for the room keys. She escapes and goes by motor scooter to Fantasy’s apartment. Knocking on the door, there is no answers and pushing the door open realizes the Fantasy has move out and disappeared. She begins to wonder if her entire experience with Fantasy was just a dream fantasy.
Mihfije meets the now-bald Jasna at a local food place where Jasna explains her plans for working abroad. When Sina shows up, there is an altercation because Jasna spills the beans on her hook-ups with Boris, the married boxing coach. Mihfije tries to intervene but ends up with a black eye. Back at home with her parents, she wonders about her future. The friendship of the three “tomboys” seems to have fallen apart. Then Mihfije’s mother tells her about a letter sitting on the table in the other room. Mihifije goes to check and, reading it, discovers that she has been accepted at the university in September. There is a future for her now.
Kukla Kersherović’s screenwriting effectively implants us in the minds of young women on the brink of adulthood, creating a sense of empathy for her characters and their travails, and she does so with style. The slight movements in Lazar Bogdanović’s camerawork, paired with Lukas Miheljak’s rhythmic editing, Relja Čupić’s moody electronic score and Julij Zornik’s perfectly calibrated sound design, create a unique, dream-like atmosphere of real “fantasy.” Kukla Kersherović’s directing style, especially when introducing lengthy sequences resembles music videos of a peculiar genre – vocoder-heavy trap mixed with “turbofolk” style from the Balkans.
The director’s method included open-form scripting, active actor input, and a visual strategy designed to support emotional and thematic developments. Kukla’s work with the largely non-professional actors is one of the strong points of Fantasy. These actors inhabit their characters and convey their emotions with conviction. Kukla already “tested” these same actors in her award-winning short Sisters (2020). The trio works well together, growing into the skin of their relationships, and separately, with Mia Skrbinać (the only professional actress) delivering a top-notch performance. Fantasy is a Slovenian-Macedonian co-production.
