Over the past two years, I’ve been documenting the Wild Men tradition and the Gorski Kotar region using 16mm film and 35mm photography, trying to understand what these rituals mean today — and how they speak to the youth growing up in rural Croatia. Having grown up in a small village near Rijeka, I’ve always been drawn to the unspoken codes of these places: to folklore, to physicality, to what remains hidden behind tradition.

This film is born from that pull. It mirrors my own experience of leaving — and returning. During the 2020 lockdown, I reconnected with the landscapes and stories I once wanted to escape. In contrast, Željko, the film’s central character, never left. His story explores what happens when tradition becomes a burden, and when male friendship — shaped by ritual, aggression, and silence — starts to fracture.

At its core, this is a film about masks. The ones we inherit, the ones we perform, and the ones we no longer want to carry. Through the world of the Wild Men, I wanted to explore masculinity as something fragile, coded and passed down — and ask what remains when the ritual ends.