Gravehopping

GRAVEHOPPING receives the award because it makes you laugh, plays with death and in the end stabs you in the heart.

-Jury at the Turin Film Festival, 2005

Theatre of absurd which translates insecurities and values of the whole of humanity into black comedy. In his second film Cvitkovič revolutionary transforms Balkan cinematography. The film is already a classic.

-The official catalogue of the Turin Film Festival, 2005

The film is beautiful because it is the complete opposite of the films by Emir Kusturica.

-Bruno Fornara for La Republicca

Set in the idyllic Slovene Karst region, black comedy by Jan Cvitkovič opens with a quote by J.D. Salinger: 'When I was six I realized that god was everything and that made my hair stand on end.' His hero Pero makes his living with funeral speeches, while his father Dedo, still mourning after his wife died six years ago, keeps trying, innovatively but unsuccessfully, to kill himself. Pero's speeches are full of nonsense, euphemisms and fragments of personal psychology which vanish behind the heads of the bereaved. His neighbour Šuki, after seeing a film with Roman carriages, decides to inventively make and assemble blades on the wheels of his Fiat Cinquecento. The film philosophically faces life and death, heaven and hell, humorously approaches the chaos of life as well as inventively shows suppressed aggression that lies behind the usual façades or flares up with grotesque brutality which suddenly bursts out from the relaxing environment. Gregor Baković created a brilliant funeral role as Pero. All the other actors in this Cvitkovič's black and ironic portrait of human condition are absolutely self-confident.

• Peter Holmes for the London Times Film Festival