Hedgehog's Home

animated film

NFB-ONF - Bonobon Studio
co-production 2015

Hedgehog’s Home is the NFB’s first international coproduction with Croatia since the dissolution of the former Yugoslavia. It is co-produced by the National Film Board (Jelena Popović, producer) and Bonobostudio (Vanja Andrijević, producer). Art and photography by Eva Cvijanović. Written in rhyming verse by the ex-Yugoslav poet and novelist Branko Ćopić, the story was first published in 1949 and has never gone out of print. “Hedgehog’s Home’s was one of the first stories that we all heard as kids: it’s deeply engrained in the popular imagination,” says Popović. “It tells a simple but powerful story about the importance of home.”

Happy as a clam, he murmurs with glee
“My home sweet home, where I feel free.
You beautiful castle with a wooden dome
My soft leafy cradle, my one and only home.
You are my kingdom, my only stronghold.
I would not trade you for silver or gold

From Sarajevo with Sorrow by Goran Simic

Windsor, Biblioasis, 2005

"THE BEGINNING, AFTER EVERYTHING

After I buried my mother, running from the
shelling of the graveyard; after soldiers returned
my brother's body wrapped in a tarp; after I saw
the fire reflected in the eyes of my children as
they ran to the cellar among the dreadful rats;
after I wiped with a dishtowel the blood from
the face of an old woman, fearing I would
recognize her; after I saw a hungry dog licking
the blood of a man lying at a crossing; after
everything, I would like to write poems which
resemble newspaper reports, so bare and cold
that I could forget them the very moment a
stranger asks: Why do you write poems which
resemble newspaper reports?



 "

Immigrant Blues
by Goran Simic

Brick Books, 2003, 2004

An Immigrant Poem
(excerpt)

"We who doze in sleepy subways at dawn
and read yesterday's newspapers in city buses
have never missed our Saturday evenings.
We meet in a bar and talk about the homeland.

We swallow beer greedily as if washing down the sickness
that inhabits our stomach every Monday
with the alarm-clock ringing
and the anxious face of an employer who doesn't understand
the point of talking about homeland and politics.

There, springs smell of childhood,
there, mother smells of kitchen towels
there, people have time to love."

Heart of Darkness by Ferida Durakovic

Fredonia, NY: White Pine Press, 1998

INTERPRETER

You fertilize and multiply in me, light.
Through me, through the witness, you pour,
but you are deprived of charm. You bring only
bugs from the dust
raised onto my clean palms and days.

So, here is spring. Sure of itself,
a child breathes in the world with spices.
And I? I travel, not asking for comfort.
I have been given to be an interpreter,
not a celebrity.

I travel, offering only
a rendition of comfort - consolatory interpretation
of steps in a dead spot.