Tolerantia
2008 · 6m · Bosnia y Herzegovina
Directed by Ivan Ramadan
Genres: fantasy, historical, satire
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, provocative
At the end of the Ice Age, a caveman awakens in what is now Bosnia and builds a pyramid. When someone throws a stone at him one day, a spiral of violence is unleashed.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A caveman building a pyramid in Bosnia during the Ice Age—everyone else would call this confused, but Ramadan's using historical impossibility as a Trojan horse for something far more subversive about cycles of violence and territorial absurdity. The fact that it plays this completely straight while being completely insane is exactly the kind of premise that makes consensus critics deeply uncomfortable.
Ramadan's construction of this film sits uneasily between satire and allegory, which is precisely its formal problem; the visual language doesn't quite commit to whether we're watching myth-making or its deconstruction, leaving the piece tonally scattered despite its evident intelligence about archetype and escalation.
The escalation from a single thrown stone to spiraling violence could collapse into didacticism, but Ramadan makes the choice to stay close on the caveman's face—letting us watch comprehension and hurt transform into something darker—which transforms what could be a heavy-handed statement into something genuinely unsettling and human.