Factumentaries

Passage for Stella

Ljiljana Šišmanović
A film about a girl whose microcosm is confined not only by disease and disability, but also by cold-heartedness of her neighbors.

Stella lives in Zagreb. She is thirteen, she does not speak, does not walk and does not see almost anything. She can only move if assisted or in a wheelchair. Stella was born with a 100-percent disability: she has a complex cerebral paralysis, hypoplasia of corpus calosum, spinal tumor and a hard form of mental retardation. In order to make carrying of Stella from the street to their apartment less difficult (the route includes 35 steps, plus once again that many for carrying the wheelchair), the parents requested their neighbors to allow them passage through their backyard in order to avoid the staircase. However, the neighbors would not hear of it.

Ljiljana_sismanovic

Ljiljana Šišmanović

Ljiljana Šišmanović was born in Zagreb in 1970. She graduated in Croatian Language and Class Teaching from the Zagreb Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences. She has made some thirty documentary films, mostly produced by the Croatian Radiotelevision. Her best-known documentaries, The Last Bay of the Panonian Sea (2002) and The Mark of Cain (2010, co-directed with Tihana Kopsa) were shown in official competition of national and international festivals (ZagrebDox, Croatian Film Days, Tabor Film Festival, Liburnia Film Festival, etc.). ZagrebDox screened her documentaries Half-sister (2006), The Cinkuši (2008), Passage for Stella (2014) and Unsuccessful Totally (2017).

General sponsor

Prolaz za Stellu

Croatia
2014, 38', video

Directed by:
Ljiljana Šišmanović

Screenplay by:
Ljiljana Šišmanović

Cinematography:
Davor Borić

Edited by:
Ivor Ivezić

Producer:
Nenad Puhovski

Produced by:
Factum