Serbian film director Ivan Ikić went into the two-month shoot scheduled for “Oasis”He knew that he couldn’t find the authenticity he desired by casting non-actors as young people in a love triangle. They were residents of a Serbian facility for intellectually disabled individuals.
What Ikić did not know was whether that approach was actually going to work.
“My fear was concentrated from beginning that we will fail in one moment,” Ikić said in a conversation with ’s Sharon Waxman. He was worried that his inexperienced cast members would become overwhelmed during a two month shooting schedule. “oversaturated”Filming can be distracting and cause loss of focus. This would adversely affect the characters they were playing.
Instead, Ikić found the opposite. “It was completely different, actually,”He elaborated. “They gained more techniques and skills during the shooting… after awhile they were behaving as any other actor on the set.”Although there are some professional actors, the leading roles of Marija (Marijana Novakov), Dragana(Tijana Markovic), and Robert (Valentino Zumi) were performed by real-life residents.
“Oasis” is Ikić’s second feature after 2014’s “Barbarians,”A film shot in Mladenovac (a suburb of Belgrade) during the period leading up to the 2008 protests in which the country was ravaged by the Kosovo declaration of independence.
In “Oasis,” Ikić explores another bleak landscape, the world of the residents of the facility, where they were not allowed to leave without an escort. Ikić describes the institution, still in existence, as a throwback to an era when such institutions were common in many countries, including the U.S., in the 1960s and 1970s, though most were phased out by the 1980s.
The filmmaker stated that he became familiarized with the institution, which is located in Belgrade (Serbia, Yugoslavia), when a representative of the residence visited his film academy and asked for volunteers. It was over 15 years ago. Ikić went, and continued to visit in the ensuing years, developing his interest in making a film there.
Ikić said that the film had a somewhat erratic shooting schedule because each of the actors had a different attention span and level of perceptual focus. But he stressed that the movie was not dependent on improvisation. “It was really strict… I wrote almost all the dialogue before the shooting, it was not part of any kind of improvisation,” Ikić said.
Added Ikić, “Since the beginning I wanted them to play the roles, not to play themselves, (which is) much easier to do. I tried to teach them acting. I used basic technique of acting, which for any actor is common… but I modified, especially for them and their disability.”
Ikić noted that as the movie has entered the festival circuit it has opened discussion on some of the difficult issues addressed in the film, including suicide. He said that the film has also been a catalyst for discussion about suicide. “opened some very sensitive topics about the institutionalization of the people with intellectual disabilities — which could be in the future somehow opens up space for new new ways of how to deal with the situation.”