Our Father

Our Father is a fictional short film that tells a story of two women—a mother (Mira, 53, an immigrant from Croatia) and her daughter (Emily, 30, a born Canadian)— who are trying to set aside their differences while traveling to the cemetery where Mira’s deceased husband and Emily’s father is buried. Various disputes happen during their time in the car: the daughter’s lack of interest in visiting the grave of her father regularly, Emily’s (in her mother’s view) masculinized appearance, their differing views on death and religion, and the mother’s strict and unforgiving attitude towards life. The main conflict arises when the mother realizes that Emily failed to buy a proper set of flowers, thus exhibiting a lack of understanding and commitment to preserving the tradition of godišnjica (a yearly visit to the grave of a deceased relative). After enduring the pain of revisiting their pasts and dealing with their ongoing interpersonal conflicts, Mira and Emily end their visit to the cemetery with an unsettling feeling that their differences will never be alleviated. The last exchange of words between them, in which Mira sends out a prayer to God in Croatian (uttering a full sentence in her native language for the first time during the film), and Emily does not understand her, hints that their oppositions might have an additional level of complexity. As they leave the cemetery, life goes back to ‘normal’, the birds start chirping and Mira and Emily go back to their every-day talk, hinting that the conflicts between them will keep reemerging over and over again, specially during the yearly godišnjica.