After many years, Karla returns to her home island where she must face everything she left behind.

In Sola, writer-director Lana Barić crafts a deeply introspective portrait of return and reckoning. After many years away, Karla finds herself drawn back to her remote home island—a place steeped in memory, silence, and unresolved emotion. What begins as a homecoming slowly unravels into a confrontation with the past, as Karla must face everything she once fled: the ghosts of her choices, the weight of family, and the ache of belonging.

Through its quiet pacing and evocative island setting, Sola captures the fragile tension between nostalgia and renewal. Barić’s film is as much about the landscapes we leave behind as it is about the inner terrain of regret and healing. With sparse dialogue and powerful visual storytelling, Sola is a meditative exploration of identity, distance, and the courage it takes to come home.

Sola follows Karla’s return to her home island after many years away. What drew you to telling a story about returning, confronting the past, and the emotions tied to home?

I’ve always been fascinated by what happens when you return to a place you once left behind — a place that still defines you in some way. Coming back home is never just a physical act, it’s an emotional confrontation with what we thought we had escaped. I wanted to explore how spaces and the people in them carry memories that inevitably resurface.

The film deals with solitude and reconciliation. How did you approach balancing the personal struggles of Karla with the universal themes of identity and belonging?

Karla is very specific as a character, with her own shadows and inner turmoil, but her questions are universal: Where do I belong? Who am I when I return to where I come from? I tried to build her intimacy with precision and care, while letting it echo broader questions of identity and belonging that most of us share.

Islands often carry a strong symbolic weight in cinema — isolation, beauty, memory. How did you use the island setting to deepen the emotional landscape of the film?

For me, the island became a character in itself. It is both a refuge and a trap; a space of beauty, but also of limits and isolation. I wanted the landscape to speak as strongly as the actors — the waves, the stone, the wind, the emptiness of space all mirroring Karla’s unrest.

The cinematography captures both intimacy and distance. What choices in framing or atmosphere helped communicate Karla’s inner journey?

We used handheld camera work to preserve a sense of closeness and fragility, while also composing wider frames of emptiness and horizons to emphasize solitude. This interplay of the intimate and the distant created the rhythm of Karla’s inner journey.

Karla’s character has layers of silence, longing, and confrontation. What was the process like working with the actor to bring such an internal character to life?

We worked a lot on nuances — silences between lines, the rhythm of breathing, the weight of a look. With a character like Karla, what remains unsaid is just as important as what is spoken.

Did you leave room for improvisation in performances, or was every beat of Karla’s journey carefully scripted?

The structure was clearly written, but I did leave some space for improvisation, mainly in the scene between Karla and Maja.

What conversations do you hope Sola sparks around themes of migration, memory, and the weight of unfinished stories?

I hope the film encourages reflection on what it truly means to return — not just physically, but emotionally. Our unfinished relationships and unspoken words always wait for us. Migration is not only about leaving, it’s about what happens when we step back into the past we thought we had left behind.

Looking forward, do you see Sola as part of a larger narrative world you’d like to explore further, or was it meant as a self-contained story?

For me, Sola is a complete story, but the themes it opens up — return, identity, inner searching — continue to be at the core of my interest as a filmmaker. I could revisit them from other perspectives, but Karla’s journey felt whole as it is.

Can you share with us some of your favorite short films you’ve seen lately?

The Croatian short that won at Cannes and was Oscar-nominated: “The Man Who Could Not Remain Silent.”