Fine Dead Girls is part of The Global Lens Collection

Iva and Marija, a lesbian couple, rent an apartment in a seemingly quiet building in Zagreb, but what initially appears as a safe love haven quickly turns into a nightmare. A winner of the Best Croatian Film Award, Fine Dead Girls has been named one of the best Croatian movies of the last decade, and garnered much attention due to its controversial, provocative themes.

"Croatian director Dalibor Matanic creates a disturbing metaphor for his country’s recent upheavals in a Zagreb apartment building whose residents become unhinged after the arrival of two happily coupled young lesbians. The building is under the thumb of elderly harpy Olga, her mentally unstable sexual-predator son Daniel, and her laid-back older husband. Olga’s kingdom, meant to mimic the dislocation and madness afflicting Croatia during the Yugoslav civil wars, has a feisty menagerie of tenants including a female prostitute, a desperately abused housewife, a religious fanatic who’s keeping his new deceased wife around the way Norman Bates kept his mom, a mentally retarded handyman, a warcrazed ex-soldier who keeps the building in an uproar with Midnight martial music concerts, and a jolly elderly abortionist who’s working overtime.

There’s something about the openness and normality of Iva and Marija’s relationship that infuriates Olga, whose weather-beaten countenance is the face of intolerant, inborn Fascism the likes of which is seldom found on our shores. Olga begins a one-woman witch-hunt against the lesbians that soon escalates into rape, murder and kidnapping.

This erotically driven horror fest [is] especially diabolical; not for all tastes, but smart, chilling and thought-provoking. As with Rosemary’s Baby, you don’t have to believe in witches to fear winding up in a coven."
- David Lamble, Bay Area Reporter

WINNER! YOUNG JURY AWARD, Geneva Festival of Film & Television

WINNER! AUDIENCE AWARD- BEST FILM, Pula Film Festival

WINNER! SPECIAL JURY AWARD, Sochi International Film Festival

What the Critics are Saying

"Diabolical, erotically driven...smart, chilling and thought-provoking!"- Bay Area Reporter

"Beautiful, intense, bizarre!"- Gay People's Chronicles

"A choice chunk of Croatian allegory which succeeds nicely!" - Village Voice