If there is anyone who embodies the current state of life in Croatia, it is Police Detective Ivan Perić. The son of a fisherman, he became a detective as a way of avoiding working in the only real industry of latter-day Croatia — tourism. Now his life is consumed by trying to solve a series of essentially unsolvable murders of tourists. Because the tourists are so widely despised, no one will help him. Evidence disappears into the labyrinth of bureaucracy. He’s humiliated in public and online. In the local press, his boss even labels him an “uhljeb,” the Croatian slur for a lazy bureaucratic parasite. To add insult to injury, his boss then exploits Ivan’s failure to solve the crimes to run for parliament on an anti-uhljeb platform. All of this takes place in the city of Split, in the ruins of Yugoslavia.

Presented at the Berlin International Film Festival.