Nominated for two 2016 Canadian Screen Awards
Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role (Jasmin Geljo)
Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role (Cynthia Ashperger)
“supremely poetic” – Eric Kohn, Indiewire
“an intricate hall of mirrors” – Richard Porton, Cineaste
“skillfully told in present and in flashbacks” – Jim Slotek, Toronto Sun
Following a very successful international festival run that included Locarno, TIFF and Rotterdam, and two 2016 Canadian Screen Award nominations, Igor Drljaca’s haunting character study, The Waiting Room opens in Calgary’s Globe Cinema, starting June 24 after it’s Toronto run that opened on June 3rd and the TIFF Bell Lightbox.
A performer who once brought slapstick laughter to TV viewers in his native former Yugoslavia, Jasmin (Jasmin Geljo) is a rootless soul. Now an underemployed actor in Toronto, he finds the pieces of his former and present life meshing uncomfortably. When he is cast for a role set amidst the very Bosnian-Herzegovinian civil war he escaped decades earlier, the line between fiction and reality become blurred.
Pointedly not a war story, The Waiting Room is about the long legacy of wartime effects, and the often-tragic backstories that immigrants carry.
Drljaca’s second feature after the acclaimed Krivina, The Waiting Room was partly inspired by Geljo’s life story.
“He was a successful actor in pre-war Sarajevo and was part of a wildly-popular televised stage show called Audicija (The Audition),” says director Drljaca. “Jasmin, like many others, left his homeland during the war in the 1990s, aware that his stay would likely be permanent, but always hoping to return. Zeljko Kecojevic, who plays Zoran in the film, was also a member of Audicija, and like Jasmin, moved to Toronto.”
Drljaca says a key consideration was to never show actual war scenes, even in flashback. “Rather, the intention was to tie every scene into the present. When Jasmin is cast as an actor showing an ‘idyllic’ trip from coastal Croatia into the heartland of pre-war Bosnia and Herzegovina, I wanted to blur the lines of fiction and re-creation, the tragic and the absurd.”
Himself a native of Sarajevo, Drljaca has lived in Canada since 1993, where – with his producing partner Albert Shin (In Her Place) – he has gained notice as a blazingly creative cinematic storyteller. The Waiting Room is his second feature film, his first (Krivina), and many of his shorts have also screened at TIFF, and other major festivals. His in-development third feature Tabija has already received backing from the Cannes Film Festival’s L’Atelier program.
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