The film “Ice” represents an apotheosis of loyalty and love. The story focuses on the lives of archetypal characters and metaphorically represents the inexorable uprooting of a Serbian family during the 1970s, the demise and disappearance of hamlets and villages in the magnificent Šumadija, the most beautiful region of central Serbia.

Set in Šumadija’s Radomilje village during the period of false bliss in Yugoslavia during the last decade of Tito’s life – in 1976, the dramatic plot focuses on 20-year-old villager Milivoje, living with his mother Stana, grandfather Životije and grandmother Saveta. Milivoje is torn and haunted by the portentous and foreboding memories of the harrowing death of his father in a quarry 10 years earlier, when he was still a boy. Clandestine love between his mother and man called Miroslav, living in the neighboring house across the hill, makes his drama and suspicions even stronger. 

The screenplay for the film “Ice” is based on the themes of the 1976 monodrama of the same name, written by renowned Serbian scriptwriter, actor and director Rados Bajic.

“Ice” is the debut work of a director Jelena Bajic –Jocic, of which she said:

This is a poetic elegy of people torn between heaven and earth, a film of state of mind, internal conflict and the most delicate of apprehensions, atmosphere, nostalgia and melancholy. It is a tale of lost happiness and dreams, fears and transience, the supremacy of fate and the laws of nature, the gratitude and cruelty of nature, the inability of man to change that and influence the course of his own life…

With its universal message, “Ice” strongly asserts the fundamental virtues and values of life, love, honesty, justice, dignity, honor, kindness, respect… Accordingly, and despite the fact that it is a Serbian story, in terms of place of origin and residence, its design of a unique national identity within a traditional, anthropological and cultural context, “Ice” has the ambition to establish broad communication and recognize its viewers wherever in the world they may be.