"Carbide" (2022) is the feature debut of Josip Žuvan, a director and screenwriter known for several short films and television series, who with this film demonstrates his broader capabilities. "Carbide" ignites the fuses of family structures and through technology offers a fresh perspective on the generation gap.

This drama, skillfully bordering on the comedic, follows two twelve-year-old boys from a remote village in Dalmatia. It's the time before Christmas, and friends and neighbors Antonio and Nikola (Mauro Ercegović Gracin and Franko Floigl) freely indulge in pyrotechnics and technology, while their families bicker over a piece of land. The film starts with a scene of rain. The camera focuses on a puddle and drags across the floor until a car appears in the frame. A gunshot from a pistol shatters its windows. This film noir allusion is quickly interrupted by the next scene - the shaky camera of a boy's cellphone while the other boy in front of it sets off "garbura," or carbide, which relieves the tension in the film. The trembling-hand filming is contrasted with static shots of uncomfortable family dinners. The boys carve out a dangerous but freer separate world while the relationships within and between the two families are filled with frustrations and unspoken truths. They channel the tension into a game full of explosions, playing with carbide, an outdated form of pyrotechnics, and Nikola's grandfather's pistol, a sort of inheritance as they step into the world of adults.

When they are not in front of screens, they often mimic the patterns of their favorite computer games in their play. The boys hypocritically scorn their obsession with technology, which equally captivates the attention of the adults. Antonio's mother (Ivana Rošić) is always accompanied by Magazin's hits, mostly from the speaker of her mobile phone, while Nikola's father (Ljubomir Bandović) paranoidly hides his screen. Unlike the boys, the virtual world does not provide them with freedom but only a brief escape into the forbidden. Moisture has seeped into the marriages they are trying to escape, as well as into the walls of Nikola's house, indicating the stagnation of family structures and the inadequacies of the society in which these families quietly and slowly deteriorate. The moisture is the water that has settled into the structure of the house itself, but more water is poured into the flow of the film's narrative. From the aforementioned opening scene of rain, to the puddle where the boys' camera lingers, to the water that Nikola's father and grandmother tirelessly shovel from the yard, the cold and bland rainwater faithfully follows the cold and bland relationships of the adult characters of "Carbide," and in contact with water, carbide changes its state. Gray tones on New Year's Eve are replaced by warmer ones, while the mothers of both families decide for the first time to stand up for themselves and shake up the existing family dynamics. Their sons follow suit, and a few months later, they resume their game where they left off, and the rain has finally stopped. With his GoPro camera, Antonio films himself walking towards Nikola, who is piloting a drone in the last scene of the film. These may be just gifts from fathers who feel guilty, but the camera is once again in the hands of the boys.

Thus, the director does not dwell on criticizing society but shows a small but significant moment of emancipation. The film intertwines familiar themes of coming-of-age narratives; unfulfilled promises, shattering illusions, and formative friendships with the peculiarities that these experiences have today. Without moralizing or preaching about the omnipresence of technology in children's lives, the director introduces it into the story as a tool in storytelling. With complex characterization of twelve-year-olds, Žuvan defies the disdain for Generation Z (and Alpha) by older generations and the horror of the dangers of social networks, turning the viewer's gaze towards the ossified structures of Croatian everyday life.