“Shallow Ground”, interview with director Jozo Schmuch

At the Future Frames – Generation NEXT of European Cinema 2026, organized by European Film Promotion and the 60th edition of the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, Croatian director Jozo Schmuch presents Shallow Ground. Shot on 16mm, the film imagines a son who vanished during Croatia’s war of independence returning to his elderly mother three decades later, unaged and unmarked, a reunion whose warmth is shadowed by disbelief. Schmuch’s graduation film, it draws directly on the disappearance of his own uncle.

A closure that never came

Schmuch describes Shallow Ground as “a magical realism drama where there is not a lot of magic, but it’s very present,” built around a grief that was never allowed to resolve. “It’s exploring the theme of when somebody is missing, either in the war or their body was never found, can you ever actually grieve for them?” Asked about reviews describing the film as an honest portrait of grief, Schmuch agreed readily: “It’s a film about grief mostly, but then also it’s a film about love, and about how mothers and sons, in the end, love each other.”

An uncle he never met

The film began, technically, as a graduation project, but its real origin lies closer to home. “My uncle, my mother’s cousin, he went missing during the war. They lived together, he was like a brother to her. He went missing during the fall of Vukovar and his body was never found.” Growing up, Schmuch inherited the loss secondhand. “I spent my childhood hearing about him and missing ever meeting him, having this sort of nostalgic feeling for somebody I never met.” He made the film, he says, for every family living the same unresolved story, in Croatia and elsewhere: “I wanted to make a film for people who haven’t found their loved ones and who are grieving without any concrete proof of their death.

Refusing to take sides

It mattered to Schmuch that the film resist being pulled into the nationalistic register that often surrounds war stories. “It was extremely important for me not to let this movie take a nationalistic dimension, because often when movies deal with the war, they can be used for nationalistic and right-wing purposes, and this is something that I’m very against.” The idea took shape while he was editing an earlier documentary short, one that takes a critical look at how the war is taught in schools. “When you hear about the war in these big and large numbers, they are just statistics, the weapons of propaganda and of indoctrination. But when you take it to the personal level, to two people that it happened to, it becomes something that’s much larger than that.” His hope for the film has nothing to do with assigning blame: “The most important part to take out of this film is not hatred for the warring sides of this Croatian independence war, Serbians and Croatians, but rather to see that a thing like that should have never happened and it should never happen again, in any part of the world.”

The privilege of European cinema

Before studying film directing, Schmuch trained in medicine. “Being a doctor is so much more concrete. But I think the arts, they teach us why life is worth living, and they show us the complexity of human emotions, the messy thing about being human.” Asked about the role of European cinema today, he points to a shared culture under pressure from shrinking public funding. “We are constantly bombarded with funding cuts, investing more into defensive budgets, the European Union turning toward defense but defunding creative media. What makes us both Europeans and, say, Germans or Croatians, it’s our culture. It’s the most basic thing about us, and we must fight by every possible means to stop defunding arts.”

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