Franjo & Ana collecting wood, Kaluderovac

This film was made in 1990 just before the wars of 1991-5, when Franjo Arbanas of Kaluđerovac was the last practicing potter in a region where scores, or even hundreds of potters had been active a century earlier.
At the time of filming pottery-making was still practiced in the context of a subsistence farming economy dependent on a mixture of stock, strip fields and plum orchards. Here he is assisted by Ana, his wife, in collecting plum tree prunings from the extensive orchards which surround the village. The horse was stalled with a cow and a pig in the stone-walled ground floor of the house which was partly set into the hillside and supported the timber-framed living accommodation. The grey mare was well-fed in its stall and sometimes allowed to graze freely with the other village horses after the harvest in late Summer, but eventually its relatively high running costs combined with the waning strength of Franjo and Ana led to it being sold to the intinerent dealers who still travelled through the villages at this time. Franjo Arbanas died as the last potter of Lika soon after the 1991-5 war and Ana, a decade or so younger than Franjo, then moved away to live with her daughter near Otocac, surviving him by only a few years. Although a properly surfaced toll road has now been built through Kaluderovac, many of the old, timber-framed houses have disappeared, some of them replaced - like Franjo and Ana’s - by modern brick and breeze-block structures which primarily serve as weekend or holiday homes.