Accidental Luxuriance of the Translucent Watery Rebus: Interview with Dalibor Baric

After Unknown Energies, Unidentified Feelings (2015), a feature film which opened in 2015 at Animafest Zagreb, Croatian filmmaker Dalibor Baric gets another feature animation with an even bigger title -now selected at the Online Annecy Festival edition (Contrechamp competition).

In the 90-minute Accidental Luxuriance of the Translucent Watery Rebus (ALTWR), a clandestine romance and operation is in order.

Martin tried to fight the system, and now he's on the run. Sara is a conceptual artist. Together they join the revolutionary commune in the countryside. The police are on their trail. Inspector Ambroz knows the right questions are more important than the answers. Because maybe none of this is true - Film Synopsis

Having production support from the Croatian Audiovisual Centre (HAVC) and Grad Rijeka, Dalibor Baric counts exactly one year to make the feature film -even though being a freelancer had to leave the film for other job assignments -and reconnect afterwards.

Read our Film Review for Accidental Luxuriance of the Translucent Watery Rebus.

Watch the trailer for Accidental Luxuriance of the Translucent Watery Rebus.

In some ways, ALTWR is a continuation of his previous work process (including the feature film Unknown Energies, Unidentified Feelings), using voice actors around which animation is built. Yet, thematically and storywise,a s Dalibor Baric tells Zippy Frames, the film is a little bit different this time. "There's this whistler guy who has exposed some dirty, illegal deeds and his life situation went from bad to worse. He is on the run, and probably on the verge of psychic disintegration. There is a science fiction-themed story within the story, voiced by the same actor, but as a different character who appears to be a guinea pig in a time-traveling experiment. This is left ambiguous on purpose because it serves as a metaphor for the sense of unease, alienation, and confusion of the main protagonist. And there are a lot of different voices, who kind of covering the story from other angles, even if they don't appear to be directly connected to the main character Martin.

The actors voiced the characters in the studio, but there was no film shooting involved. "I think the benefit of that is that we have reached some strange Interzone between feature film and animation" explains the director. "Like other kinds of representing reality, where more things are allowed creatively than in a classical feature film where the one must be careful not to compromise the "reality" of the film's world with let say the weird element.In this way, I can be serious, I can be funny, surreal, unreal, I don’t need to explain a lot of things whose intention is to poetically build the setting of the film."

Dalibor Baric is both the director and artistic director of the mixed-technique film, and signs the film's soundtrack. The biggest challenge in ALTWR was the artistic direction. "Not every scene in the movie could be expressed with the same visual style of storytelling. I had to search to find what suits them better for particular pieces and how they relate to each other. So, visually the story goes from more realistic rotoscope scenes to comic collages, found footage, and even experimental abstraction."

The experimental film competes at the 2020 Online Annecy Festival (Feature Films Contrechamps In Competition).