In the hospital, Mia is advised to have a laparoscopy, scheduled in three months. She is angry because her stomach is "her favorite part of the body", but agrees. Before the surgery, she must not eat anything for 34 hours nor drink anything for 24 hours. During the surgery, a benign tumor is removed from her abdomen, leaving three small stitches below the stomach. Mia chronicles her stay in the hospital bed and other patients in her room. She is released and sent back home.
Another creative coup from Kino Klub Zagreb, "Ode" is an excellent documentary about the director's personal and intimate experience with a laparoscopy in the hospital—even though it could have ended depressing, the author Mia Maros Zivkovic refuses to treat is as such and instead makes a creative, vibrant, unusual portrait with humor. The opening scene of a giant uterus lingering on the screen while Mia's words "Is it uncomfortable for you?" can be heard in the background, sum up her own feeling while waiting for a medical diagnosis and procedure of her abdomen. She uses several inventive details, from drawing a smiley sign on each of the three tapes glued over her three scars on the abdomen, up to depicting her feeling of a painful menstruation (an animated flow of a "red current with small sharp particles flowing through her"), allowing for a delicate depiction that outgrows just the clinical side of the story. One episode is interesting: Mia mentions a woman on the hospital bed left of her who was bizarrely diagnosed with both a normal pregnancy and an ectopic pregnancy at the same time, and thus the doctors gave her two options—a surgery "burns" the ectopic fetus, or a needle injects poison in the ectopic fetus, removing it, though both threaten to affect the healthy fetus in her uterus. Luckily, the woman's normal fetus was left unaffected after the surgery. Using the situation almost everyone will experience at least once in their life, Zivkovic was able to create a POV "video blog" of this situation in the hospital, creating a brave, honest, genuine and cinematically skilful film essay.
Grade:+++
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