Croatian-Serbian Comedy ‘The Wedding’ Makers Talk Unexpected Success

Croatian director Igor Šeregi is in a car on route to the Adriatic Film & TV Awards, taking place at the luxury Porto Montenegro marina in late October, when he joins a Zoom call with producer Ivan Kelava to discuss their box office record-breaking Croatian Serbian cross-cultural comedy The Wedding.

The picture takes its cue from the daughter of a Croatian businessman and her Serbian boyfriend, the son of a high-ranking politician, who fall pregnant and decide to get married to the horror of their nationalist parents.

The contemporary Romeo and Juliette tale, tapping into cultural differences and similarities across the Balkans, while taking a dig at nationalism and political corruption, has struck a chord in a region still coming to terms with the decade-long cycle of violence that followed the breakup of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s.

Since its release in January, The Wedding has drawn more than 2.5M spectators across 32 territories, with the bulk of the admissions in Croatia and Serbia, for a box office of more than $20M. That’s a good return for a film shot over 21 days for one million euros ($1.1M)

In Croatia alone, which has a population of just under 3.9 million people, the film drew more than 800,000 spectators, breaking the long-standing 1998 record held by Titanic of some 500,000 admissions. It also enjoyed record-breaking runs in Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and North Macedonia and a successful release in Slovenia.

Midway through the conversation, Šeregi disappears, to pop up five minutes later, this time on a speed boat with the coastline receding behind him.

“I crossed the border from Croatia to Montenegro and now I am headed to Tivat,” explains Šeregi, referring to the town on the UNESCO-protected Bay of Kotor in which the marina is based. “It’s faster to get there by powerboat.”

It is the second edition of the awards devoted to films and TV shows hailing from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Croatia, Kosovo, North Macedonia, Slovenia and Serbia.

Šeregi and Kelava, who has already arrived in Tivat, are not expecting to go home with any of the top prizes.

“The film isn’t nominated which is normal for comedies, but it has been given a special mention for the box office success, which is like a made-up award,” says Šeregi.

Cast member Marko Grabež, who plays the groom, has been nominated in the Rising Star category but loses out to North Macedonian actor Arif Jakup for his performance in DJ Ahmet.

While The Wedding was not in the running for any of the main prizes, its box office success in cinemas in Croatia and Serbia, and the wider Balkans, is a major achievement.

“For the last 13 years in Croatia, there wasn’t a movie that crossed 100,000 admissions,” says Šeregi. “We were hoping maybe with Serbia, with the region, we can cross 100,000, but thankfully we were wrong.”

Forecasting the film’s potential performance was difficult, he adds, because a mainstream local comedy in the vein of The Wedding had never been made in the region before.

“There was no real point of reference. There was no big tradition of cinema aimed at audiences. We were kind of operating in a vacuum,” says Kelava, who lead produced under the Zagreb-based Eclectica banner, of which he is a cofounder, at the same time as working for Hanway Films in London where he is currently Head of Production.

It took a decade to get the production over the line, with the main challenge being convincing state film funds to back the picture. Šeregi explains their support is essential to greenlight films in a region with relatively small populations and box office potential, at least until now.

“We waited for seven years to secure state funds,” he says. “They’re usually geared to more festival oriented films, so commercial movies don’t really get made,” he says.

The final production configuration is led by Eclectica in coproduction with Serbia’s Viktorija film, and with the support of the Croatian Audiovisual Centre (HAVC), Creative Europe MEDIA, broadcaster HRT, and Duplicato Media (Blitz Group), which handled the release in Croatia.

Another milestone in development was securing actor Rene Bitorajac, best known internationally for his role in Danis Tanović’s Oscar-winning 2001 film No Man’s Land, for the role of larger-than-life Croatian businessman Miljenko Loncaric, who discovers he is on the verge of bankruptcy the day his daughter announces her pregnancy and wedding plans.

“Then we wanted to get the best Serbian actor of Rene’s generation, which is Dragan Bitorajac,” says Šeregi, referring to the actor who achieved fame across Yugoslavia prior to its breakup as a child star, with more recent credits in his prolific career including the 2023 festival hit, the Cold War drama Guardians of the Formula.

“He’s also a director and producer, and even bigger regional star than Rene. This is his first film in Croatia since the war. He’s like an icon. Once he was on board, it was a lot easier to get all the other big stars,” he continues.

Alongside Bitorajac and Bitorajac, as Serbian minister Vuk Dimitrijevic, the ensemble cast members from Serbia include Vesna Trivalic, as the minister’s wife; Anđelka Stević Žugić as his ultra efficient assistant; Grabež as the groom; Denis Murić as his wayward wannabe rapper brother, and Jelisaveta ‘Seka’ Sablić as the grandmother. Srdjan Todorovic, known internationally this collaboration with Emir Kusturica, plays an Orthodox bishop.

The Croatian cast members include Linda Begonja as businessman Miljenko’s wife; Roko Sikavica as his assistant, Nika Grbelja as the bride, Snježana Sinovčić as the grandmother and Dejan Acimovic as a Catholic bishop.

“One of the biggest strengths of the movie for me, and I think the audience, is the actors. I call them ‘The Avengers’,” says Šeregi. “Then it’s the comedy, and the third thing is the music… that’s the formula for the success of the movie.”

Releasing some 25 years after the end of the post-Yugoslavia cycle of conflict, the film came out at a time when tensions were once again running high between Croatia and Serbia.

While the tone is good natured, the film flies close to the bone at times, with insults around Croatia’s Nazi-allied Ustasha fascist movement flying, and differences between the Croatian Catholic Church and Serbian Orthodox Church and hints at the past conflicts woven into the storyline and dialogue.

“Yes, there were a lot of questions about the interactions between the Croatians and Serbs in the movie, because the actual situation isn’t good even now, some would say it’s even that worse than 15 years ago,” acknowledges Šeregi in answer to a question on the tone of the comedy.

“But maybe it helped the film because we’re dealing with it through humor and if we were really good neighbors with the Serbs, maybe this movie wouldn’t make sense,” he adds.

He was speaking prior to Serbia’s snap elections on October 25, called in response to student led protests and public discontent, which removed pro-Russia, nationalist president Aleksandar Vučić from power after 14 years of authoritarian rule, although it remains to be seen what impact this will have on country relations in the region.

Šeregi says that the film taps into intergenerational differences when it comes to politics across the region.

“The grandmas, they’re the most nationalistic; then the parents, they’re victims of capitalism, with money more important than nationalism, and then there’s Gen Z, which doesn’t really care about where you’re from, or your religion… and that really rings true in Croatia and Serbia today, where the kids, the students, are really the most democratic and the most open to all nations and religions,” he says.

Conscious of the need to be culturally authentic Šeregi brought in Serbian writers for the last draft.

“I wanted Serbian perspective on the movie, and the Croatian and Serbian dialog, which is quite different, so I wanted to be really precise,” he says.

“They really opened up something for me in in the final script, and it was a good choice. We share a lot of cultural backgrounds, Serbs and Croats, but there are these little differences. Basically, we are the same, but we’re hard about our differences, and that’s where the comedy lies for me.”

Kelava reveals that the production created two different promotional campaigns ahead of the film’s theatrical release in Croatia and Serbia, where the film was distributed by Art Vista.

“We tried to create a perception of the film being Croatian in Croatia, and Serbian film in Serbia. We had two Facebook profiles, two Instagram profiles, each in their own language, but one TikTok profile, because native TikTok users, the youngsters, as Igor talked about before, they don’t care if something is said in Croatian or Serbian or the other way around.”

On the back of the success of the film, a sequel is already in the works, but Šeregi and Kelava are keeping the plot line under wraps for now.

“Ivan doesn’t like it when I tell people,” jokes Šeregi, who seems to dismiss speculation that it will revolve around the baptism of the couple’s newborn child.

“I’m not sure that’s going to be the focus but there are a lot of intrigues and things to be fighting and laughing about,” he says.

Aside from cast members jostling for space in the production, one of the main challenges will be the shoot, after the production of the first feature drew very little attention.

“Now it will be like walking into a restaurant with the members of a Premier League soccer squad and trying to go unnoticed,” he says.

In the backdrop, Hanway, which is handling international rights, is also reporting interest in remake rights for the original film, with a Latin American version in the works, and the company set to discuss further deals at the AFM.

Addressing the remake interest, Šeregi says he is not surprised, citing the term ‘narcissism of small differences’.

“It’s when people insist on the differences even though they’re strikingly similar, so their differences are what makes their identity unique in comparison to the other,” he explains, saying that as they toured Europe with the film earlier this year, audience members from outside of the Balkans would regularly tell him how the film chimed with them but for different reasons.

“In UK, I had loads of people who have nothing to do with the region coming to us and saying, ‘Oh yeah, I know this story’.”