Marko, a popular, sporty teenager, lives with his family in a village in Croatia which is prone to flooding. He is in his last year at high school but has decided not to go to college in order to help his father start up a car repair business. He has a girlfriend Petra, and a younger brother Fico of whom he is very fond. Fico keeps rabbits.Marko’s comfortable life is about to be rocked by the arrival of his forbidden first love Slaven, who mysteriously left the village for Berlin three years ago and has returned for his father’s funeral.
While Marko is training for the village’s macho arm wrestling competition, and having sex dates with Petra, the residents are constantly transporting more and more sandbags to the river bank to shore it up against the oncoming deluge.
Marko is also building a wall to protect himself from his feelings for Slaven, but as we discover, no one can withstand the forces of nature.In Croatian, the word for sandbag dam can also be translated as “bunny dam” and here Fico’s rabbits very obviously come to represent Marko’s emotions.
The affair between the boys is treated delicately and after the gay floodgates burst open we get to see the true nature of their relationship and the true nature of their families and friends.
Straight from the Berlin film festival where it won the Teddy award for LGBTQ+ movies this modest film packs a big punch. The screenplay and acting are superb and writer, Tomislav Zajec with director Cejen Cernic accurately present the pressures and prejudices of contemporary village life.
The touching performances of Lav Novosel as Marko and Andrija Zunac as Slaven are pitch perfect.
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Sandbag Dam is screening at the BFI Flare Film Festival in London on 26th March at 20.45 and 28th March at 18.20
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Robert Malcolm is an Interior Designer who relocated from London to his home town of Edinburgh in 2019. Under the pen name of Bobby Burns he had his first novel, a gay erotic thriller called Bone Island published by Homofactus Press in 2011.
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One response to “Queerguru’s Robert Malcolm reviews SANDBAG DAM a superb coming-of-age drama that was nominated for the Teddy at the Berlinale”
[…] SANDBAG DAM a superb coming-of-age drama that was nominated for the prestigious Teddy Award at the Berlinale and is a modest film that packs a big punch. The affair between the two leading young men is treated delicately and after the gay floodgates burst open we get to see the true nature of their relationship and the true nature of their families and friends. The screenplay and acting are superb and writer, Tomislav Zajec with director Cejen Cernic accurately present the pressures and prejudices of contemporary village life plus the touching performances of Lav Novosel as Marko and Andrija Zunac as Slaven are pitch perfect. […]