How Come It’s All Green Out Here Review (KVIFF 2025)

A sober, gently resonant take on individuality caught within the intangible heritage of family.

Nikola is a Serbian director who makes a living through commercial work, while hoping to reconnect with his cinematic practice. But, thankfully, ‘How Come It’s All Green Out Here’ does not linger much on the familiar creative frustrations. Instead, the film follows his journey to Dalmatia (his father’s birthplace) where he returns to re-bury his grandmother, who died in exile. Along the way, relatives join him in the car, including his father. As they cross borders and reach the remote village, Nikola is confronted by the quiet recalibration of his own identity.

Nikola Lezaic (fourteen years after the critically noted ‘Tilva Roš’) appears to open up his own life, or at least sketch it loosely enough to let personal reflection seep in. The film unfolds chronologically, charting the days of the trip without dramatic emphasis or forced conclusions. But the camera’s patient attention to his physical awkwardness, his small refusals and gestures, suggests an underlying inquiry into inherited behaviours and how they drift over time. We’re shown very little of his present-day context—it’s not the portrait of a man between scenes—but a few suggestions emerge: someone slowly transitioning into family life, while still assuming an updated position for himself in relation to both inherited codes and self-fashioned sensitivities.

There’s something distinctly Balkan in the film’s humour and introspection, not as stylised gestures, but as a tone that’s lived-in, quietly embedded. Lezaic allows this to rise naturally, even amid the film’s more nostalgic instincts. The photography is meticulous, the colour correction exact, occasionally to the point of over-refinement. But humour acts as a balancing force, that works well as a form of attention. It’s also what anchors the film: what holds the viewer in place, and what held me in place with my eyes not falling asleep. Through humour, Lezaic begins to glimpse himself again, firstly as a son returning, and mostly as someone distanced enough by his contemporary, urban life to finally see the raw detail in every passing gesture, comment, or offhand reaction from those family members around him.

There are, undeniably, moments of quiet beauty: wide frames of Croatia’s rocky landscapes, rarely seen unless one has visited the place. But the most memorable textures come through the family’s posthumous rituals, where casual folklore and unsentimental ceremony intersect—another rarity the film manages to capture. From the questionable holes punched into sealed metal vessels meant to let the grandmother “breathe,” to the blunt stance taken beside the grave, to the continued weight of church and cemetery (still social epicentres in the Balkans) ‘How Come It’s All Green Out Here’ conveys the specificity of a place without asking it to stand in for anything else.

‘How Come It’s All Green Out Here’ premiered in the Proxima Competition at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival 2025.

How Come It’s All Green Out Here? (Kako je ovde tako zeleno?)/ Dir: Nikola Lezaic / Filip Djuric, Izudin Bajrovic, Stojan Matavulj / Serbia, Croatia, Bulgaria 2025

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