When Father Was Away on Business

In June 1950, the small world around Zvornik opens with Čika Franjo, Predrag Laković, a local drunk who serenades field workers. He sings Mexican songs to stay out of trouble, choosing tunes he hopes will be safer than anything tied to the two global powers—the United States and the Soviet Union—in a tense, watchful climate shaped by the Cold War. The atmosphere around him mirrors a country tightening its grip as the Tito–Stalin Split casts a shadow over everyday life, and a quiet paranoia begins to creep into even the most ordinary moments.

Among the town’s children is Malik, a curious and restless boy who climbs trees with his peers. Malik Moreno de Bartoli is a chronic sleepwalker, moving through days that feel too crowded with unspoken rules. His mother, Sena Mirjana Karanović, reassures him that his father is on a business trip, even as the truth gnaws at the family: Meša, a communist functionary played by Miki Manojlović, has been sent away to a labour camp. This decision comes not from the front lines of politics but from a private act—Meša had once spoken aloud about a political cartoon regarding the Tito–Stalin Split in Politika, a moment deemed dangerous enough to remove him from home. The revelation of the family rift sits at the center of Malik’s world, shaping his sense of security and belonging.

The story intricately threads through the tension of loyalty and family ties. Malik’s life is subtly shaped by the hands that guide him: a circle of relatives whose choices ripple outward. In one intimate moment, Malik is circumcised by his father’s brother, a rite that cements the ties between generations and the reach of the family’s internal politics. The uncle figure, a powerful presence in the household, becomes another sign of the complex web of duty and expectation that defines Malik’s life.

As time passes, Meša’s wife and children return to Zvornik, rejoining their father in a place that still bears the marks of the past. The boy meets Maša, the daughter of a Russian doctor, and for a fleeting moment he experiences a first, tender glimpse of love. Yet Maša’s departure comes soon after, her last memory carried away by an ambulance, leaving Malik with questions that echo through the years.

Life in the family’s orbit continues to tilt toward drama at a family gathering. At the wedding of his maternal uncle Fahro, Malik witnesses a troubling scene: his father’s affair with a woman pilot. The pilot, Ilonka Petrović, played by Eva Ras, becomes a painful focal point in a story already crowded with moral ambiguities. Ilonka’s presence—and the subsequent attempted suicide she makes using a toilet’s flush cord—injects a jarring note into a family already strained by secrecy and trial. The personal costs of political and social pressures are felt most acutely in moments like these, where private longing collides with public duty.

Amid these upheavals, Sena finds a path to reconciliation. She reconnects with her brother Zijah, a diabetes-stricken figure who has long battled the pressures of a system that demands absolute conformity. The reunion brings a fragile sense of relief, a reminder that even within a world haunted by surveillance and state power, family bonds can endure, mutate, and sometimes heal.

This film paints a mosaic of a community under pressure, where the everyday rhythms of childhood and family life are braided with a larger historical struggle. The sharp contrast between open innocence—Malik’s tree-climbing, the neighborhood games, the quiet hope of first love—and the looming shadows of political repression creates a portrait that feels both intimate and expansive. It invites viewers to consider how a nation’s ideological battles refract through the eyes of a single family, shaping memory, identity, and the road to a tentative, uncertain future.