Original title: MOJ TATA
English title: MY DAD
French title: MON PAPA

Director & screenwriter:
Irena Škorić


Screenplay ''My Dad'' got project development funding from Croatian Audiovisual Centre in 2011.

SYNOPSIS

The main character in the film is Ljerka, a hard-up primary school teacher. She is twenty-nine years old, rents a flat in a "tin can", and drives a Renault 4. She doesn't have a boyfriend, if we ignore the fictitious Ante, who her parents in Slavonia believe exists. Her only relationship is with Alfredi, the lead actor in her favourite erotic film. Ljerka is unlucky with men. A certain Miljenko, who she met at a teacher's congress in Opatija, unexpectedly calls on her after several months only in order to have a tryst with Ljerka's aunt.

A routine homework assignment for the 'bunch of small savages', as Ljerka calls her pupils, changes her life. The assignment is to write a composition entitled "My Dad". A girl, Petra, the class "troublemaker", reads her composition to Ljerka and the class: she writes that her father is a professional hit man whose wife left him because of that. Ljerka does not believe Petra, of course, and sees the composition as a provocation. She asks Petra's father to come to school.

An unusual man in a strange overall comes to see Ljerka. He is Anđelko Golubić, who says he is an ornithologist. Although Anđelko's looks and behaviour run contrary to the description in his daughter's composition, there is the seed of doubt in Ljerka's mind that it is all a front behind which lies a cold-blooded killer and the girl might have told the truth. Certain aspects of Anđelko's behaviour seem to support this. It becomes Ljerka's mission to get to the truth and unmask the phoney "birdman".

Daydreaming about Anđelko's secret, real life, Ljerka gets caught up in her own fiction. The "birdman" also drives an old Renault 4 like hers and also lives in a small flat in a "tin can" but on the other side of the city. He looks like the photo-fit of a contract killer, he has a Scorpion gun in his flat, he arranges to meet Ljerka on their first date in front of the notorious café Rio where the last execution has taken place and where he lights a candle to the victim. He hasn't turned up to two parents meetings at school, with the excuse that he had been away on business, and it is on these days that two contract killings had taken place. His daughter, Petra, on the other hand, lives in a villa with a swimming pool, which is supposedly the property of her mother's new husband, Jacques.

Anđelko prepares to go on a field trip to the island of Cres, the home of Griffon vultures. He invites Ljerka to be 'godmother of a new nest', which should be a great honour. Ljerka thinks that the trip will be an opportunity to finally establish Anđelko's true identity, as well as the nature of their relationship. But Petra, ever a nuisance, goes with them. On Cres, Ljerka, disappointed, finds out that the invitation to be "godmother of a nest" is a trick which the ornithologists use to get girls to go to the island with them, but she also finds out that Anđelko is in love with her and wants to marry her.

The local priest marries them on a cliff, with vultures circling above. Ljerka is sure that she's married to a man she loves even though she is not yet really sure who that man is.

Like in a modern fairy tale, the hard up primary school teacher ends up in the villa with a swimming pool, which Jacques, Petra's mother's new husband, has supposedly given to Petra. Although some of Anđelko's field trips coincide with contract killings, Ljerka is convinced that the three of them will live happily ever after.