In appreciation of Opera, the Oberhausen festival’s winning short, German critic Fabian Tietke takes a close look at what makes this crafty film such a vivid experience.
Nocturnal darkness covers a rural road. Dots of light scatter through the image, pale colors are interspersed in the darkness. While a dog barks in the distance, lights begin to restructure the darkness, making spaces visible that until just now lay hidden. Opera, the latest short film by Croatian director Igor Zelić, delicately plays with the possibilities of light and sound to structure the filmic space. While these elements usually play a role subservient to the narrative of a film, Opera sets them free from these limits. What ensues are 19 minutes of crafty play with light, sound, and space, the basic elements of film, in a single shot of houses alongside a road. The vivid impression of the changing lighting and the carefully orchestrated movement are in stark contrast to the static of the single shot with a fixed frame.
Throughout his film Zelić adds and subtracts visible elements; the lights are constantly reshaping what viewers see of the mysterious space lining the road. The pale glow of colors gives the image the beauty of a painting of light, against whose stillness any movement catches the eye. Light and movement shift the focus between various details of the image. Sound works as an intermediary that announces the shifts, thus creating suspense and attention. The gradual discovery of the hidden space along the road gives the film its dramaturgy; for a while it seems as if Zelić would be willing to, bit by bit, reveal more and more to the eyes of the spectators—until around the middle of the film, when this assumption is proven wrong and darkness takes over once again. The stage is set for the next phase of the film.
People rarely appear as more than a silhouette passing through the light in Opera. A tractor is driving down the road, a party is happening in the background, with glasses clinking and somebody drinking from a bottle. Another man is brushing the path along the side of his house. Some figures seem to be acting on a nocturnal theater stage while others blend into the elegant play with stillness and motion. The human action in Opera integrates with the other elements adding to the balance of movement and stillness yet through the familiarity of human behavior the spectators are more willing to conjecture a narrative from the single actions. Where is that man with his wheelbarrow heading in the middle of the night?
Almost 20 years ago Zelić made his debut with Untitled (2007) after finishing his studies at the Academy of Dramatic Arts in Zagreb. Since then has worked in the camera department for a number of films. Opera is an astonishing piece of film art that frees the basic elements of film and recombines them on an equal basis. Sound, light, and movement are able to contribute to the structure and arc of the film. Zelić reminds us of the possibilities that the elements of film themselves hold in the creation of films. The true marvel of Opera is that it both creates and is a filmic cosmos—until the arrival of the daylight sets an early end to the night’s magic. Zelić’s film not only won him the FIPRESCI award at this year’s edition of the Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen but the festival’s main award as well.
Fabian Tietke
© FIPRESCI 2026