Vatroslav Mimica is one of the greatest Croatian filmmakers of all time who started making films in the early fifties in a classic realistic style, and then he founded a cartoon studio in Zagreb and started working on animated films. In the mid-sixties, he returned to feature films, but now as an almost radical modernist, and the final part of the trilogy, which he started with “Prometheus from the island of Viševic”, and continued with “Monday or Tuesday”, he ended with this experimental artistic allegory, which was wildly booed at the premiere projection in Pula. Nevertheless, today “Kaja, I will kill you!” considered a classic of Croatian and Yugoslav cinematography, even though it is a true avant-garde film that is by no means intended for a wider mainstream audience.
The story itself is not actually here, and the plot is set in the Dalmatian town of Trogir before and during World War II. It is a city where there has been no murder for a hundred years, the locals peacefully live their typical Mediterranean lives of that era. Life is mostly hard and modest, it is far from Dalmatia as we know it today, a tourist paradise where sheds can be rented for a handful of euros, and if necessary, you can sleep in the meadows. The film was made by Mimica based on the novel Krune Quiena based on a true event, but there is no classic event. Here, in Mimica’s free interpretation, we follow some unrelated vignettes of Trogir in which society will soon divide and become violent.
As was often the case in all parts of the world in such situations, people who lived peacefully and neighborly until yesterday will become sworn enemies overnight. Many will follow fascism and will follow the path of evil, but some will not succumb to the call of evil and conformity, destruction, destruction and murder, in which Kaja, the shop owner, will eventually die. Mimic is in “Kaja, I will kill you!” actually create the main character of the entire film from the city of Trogir. That peaceful, wonderful Dalmatian place will turn into something ugly, evil. It all seems grotesque, surreal, like some terrifying nightmare, a terrifying nightmare in which the rawest instincts take control and threaten to destroy civilization. Mimica dealt with the motifs of irrational evil and criminal drive in his next film, “Događaj” from 1969, and in the mid-seventies he made his probably best-known film. Of course, we are talking about “Peasant Revolt 1573”, a phenomenal historical spectacle and one of the best Croatian films of all time.