The Spell

A surreal fairytale, Coprija combines multiple stories and beliefs from a village in Croatia. While exploring oral tradition and history, the film also explores the connection between tales, memories, reality, and something that is in between – a magical world brought into ours using storytelling. While following the structure of a not so classical fairytale, the story tells us about a little girl named Miška. Coprija is set in the 1950s, on the day of Ivanje, a celebration of the first day of summer. During preparations for Ivanje, she gets cursed by the local witches and instead of getting seriously ill, the witches’ spell, coprija, allows her to enter a world that is not our own. At the same time, her family falls into a deep sleep under strange circumstances. What they do not know is that the celebration of Ivanje will still happen, only without them there. Through eyes of a child, I want to allow us to question what is real and what is not, just like the stories we were told when we were her age.

Director’s statement
The film Coprija started as very personal research that consisted of collected odd stories, sketches, and illustrations for my bachelor’s thesis. It is a result of my own fascination with weird fairytales and real stories that you sometimes hear as a child from your relatives or a neighbor. All the stories I will be using were told to me by my grandma. I wanted to combine said ‘’real’’ fairytales into one story, inducing a fever-dream feeling in a viewer. My goal is not only to bring unknown Croatian folk tales to the public but also to make people feel like children again, to make them question and remember odd and magical things about their own childhood memories.