Maja Milos's “Cracks in the Ice” Premieres September 16
Fourteen years after Clip, Maja Milos returns with a film about skater Marija, a Cinderella story written on the outskirts of Belgrade.
A skater spins across ice that looks perfectly smooth, until a faint crack sounds somewhere beneath her blades, the kind of noise that says the surface is thinner than it looked. That sound appears to be the starting point of the new film by Maja Milos, named after it directly.
The Belgrade premiere of “Cracks in the Ice” is set for September 16 at the Mts Hall, and the film opens in theaters across Serbia the very next day, September 17. It already had its world premiere earlier, on August 18, at the 32nd Sarajevo Film Festival, before reaching audiences at home.
Milos is both director and screenwriter, and this marks her return to feature filmmaking after fourteen years. Her first feature was “Clip,” from 2012, a title that defined a generation of Serbian auteur cinema and opened festival doors for her well beyond the region. The gap between the two films is long enough that every new move carries weight, and “Cracks in the Ice” carries that weight from the choice of subject alone.
Why Cinderella?
For her starting point, the director borrowed narrative motifs from the Cinderella fairy tale, minus the magic wand and the fairy godmother. Marija, played by Jovana Stojiljkovic, is left alone with her father, a truck driver, after her mother’s death, just as a new woman moves into their home with her two daughters. The pattern is familiar: a stepmother, a home that no longer feels safe, a girl left to fend for herself. What sets this fairy tale apart is that it skips the happy ending in favor of financial uncertainty, violence, and a sexuality the heroine suppresses for a long time, until jobs she hides from her father pull her into a world where women are sexually exploited.
Milos summed up the idea in a single sentence. “I was interested in seeing how someone lives by the values of goodness in a world that can be very cruel,” said Maja Milos, the film’s director and screenwriter, in the premiere announcement. That line doubles as the sharpest description of her work so far: characters who refuse to give up on decency at the exact moment the world stops giving them any reason to.
Alongside Stojiljkovic, the cast includes Marko Grabez as a young businessman who enters Marija’s life and awakens in her the courage to accept her own sexuality, Andjela Jovanovic as her best friend, and Natasa Ninkovic, Ljubomir Bandovic, Milica Tomasevic, Nikolina Spasic and Barbara Nola. For the role of Marija, one of the most demanding of her career so far, Stojiljkovic had already won the Best Actress award at the Nis Film Meetings before the film even reached theatrical audiences.
A fairy tale set on the outskirts
The story unfolds on the outskirts of Belgrade, and that is not just a geographic detail but part of the point. Fairy tales tend to happen somewhere outside time and place, in a castle or a forest, while “Cracks in the Ice” insists on a very specific address, a street where cars break down and bills pile up. The ice from the title becomes an image for something wider than a skating rink: the thin line between a decent life and what it collapses into once the money runs out.
Whether this version of the Cinderella story holds onto that idea, or gets buried under the string of misfortunes its heroine has to overcome, will be up to the audience at the Mts Hall to judge first, once the September 16 premiere is over.
