The Trap

Marko Škobalj , Ivan Ramljak
Feature
Experimental , Drama
2013
25:00
Short length

Synopsis

A naked middle-aged man walks out of the sea and starts climbing the steep rocks of a deserted island. He walks through an abandoned underground tunnel and descends to a large, empty sandy beach where his younger wife and 6-year old daughter are waiting. Their mutual inability to communicate is witnessed by an interested but troubled woman who is fishing from a boat anchored near the beach. When the tension erupts into violence, three members of the family will become two, and finally – in the open sea – only one person remains, caught in the trap of their own emotions.

Directors

Marko Škobalj

Marko Škobalj was born in Zagreb in 1974. He is a writer of original strip scenarios, poetry, short stories and critique, and translator of technical texts, comics and books. Freelance copywriter, author of eight film scripts and director of two short films. In 2009, together with Ivan Ramljak, he directed the Liberation in 26 Pictures that won the Atlantic Group award for best short film at the Sarajevo Film Festival in 2009, and subsequently appeared at Rotterdam Film Festival and a dozen other international festivals.

Read biography

Ivan Ramljak

Ivan Ramljak was born in 1974 in Zagreb. In the nineties, he studied at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing at the University of Zagreb. In the second half of the 90s, he started working as a journalist and editor in written and electronic media, oriented towards film and musical art. At the end of the 90s, he was one of the initiators and editors of the cult pop magazine Nomad, as well as Radio Student, the first student radio station in Croatia, where he worked as an editor from 1997 to 2001. In the spring of 1999, together with a group of enthusiasts from the Udruženje za razvoj kulture (URK), he started the Močvara club in Zagreb, where he worked until 2004 as one of the club's managers, a concert organizer and DJ, and the author of the program 'Filmske večeri u Močvari'. In the winter of 2002, within the framework of URK, he started the Human Rights Film Festival Zagreb.

In the last ten years, he has mostly been involved in film directing and selection for film festivals and programs. After a series of short films - three feature films and one experimental film - which he co-directed with Marko Škobalj, in 2016 he became independent and focused exclusively on documentary films. Since then, he has directed five documentaries that have experienced great domestic and regional success, and have been shown at more than 80 festivals around the world. In addition, 'El Shatt…' was the most watched documentary film in cinemas in 2023.

In addition to directing films, from 2013 to 2022 he worked as the editor of the Kratki utorak program at the Tuškanac cinema for the Croatian Film Association, and from 2016 to 2023 as the artistic director and selector of the Tabor Film Festival. From the spring of 2022, he works as one of the short film selectors, as well as a scout for feature films from the former Yugoslavia, at the prestigious International Film Festival Rotterdam. In the meantime, he completed his BA studies in cultural management at the Baltazar Polytechnic in Zaprešić, as well as his MA in documentary directing at the ADU in Zagreb.

Read biography