The air gets thick as I start to tell my story. It’s my own, but it’s tangled with someone else’s, a veteran I met who told me his past. His voice was calm, but the pain was there, a ghost in the room. He spoke of the day he met a girl, a small, bright moment before he was wounded and ended up in a wheelchair.
When he told me that, something shifted in my mind. His story intertwined with my own. I was a young soldier, barely 18, and the war took so much from me, including my chance to finish a music or film degree. I went to war, but I was always meant to be a musician, a director, an artist. The military life consumed me, and my dreams were put on hold.
Now, years later, the echoes of those dreams still haunted me. So, I started to improvise. I'm not a professional musician. I'm not a professional filmmaker. But I've always been a performer. My passion wasn't about fame or money—it was about creating, directing, acting, writing, producing a music—anything that would let me express what was inside me. This art, for me, became therapy.
Memories are like an old, yellowed film reel. They take me back to the days before the war, to a time of immense fervor and desire—the dream of studying music and/or film. The very thought that this could be my life, my purpose, ignited a passion that burned both heart and mind.
I remember my guitar, the warmth of the keyboard keys under my fingers in the quiet of my room. I recall the school stage, which meant the world to me, where I acted, directed, and breathed art. Then the dance classes, and later the choreographies with those young people who loved movement, that beautiful communication of the body.
And then—the war.
Everything stopped. Life was packed into a single suitcase and sent to an unknown address. Now here I am, in military disability retirement, trapped in body and spirit by the heavy consequences of my wounding. The physical and psychological pain I carry, the continuous surgeries, hospitals, recoveries—all of it defines my daily life.
I wonder, amidst this cycle of pain and struggle, am I obliged to explain to anyone why I continue to create?
My audience is modest: fifty “furious fans”—a neighbor from the building, a few friends, family, and the occasional random “flyer” on the internet. And that's it. I don't expect more, and out of respect for true artists and their work, I often question whether I even deserve anything more.
I am my own laboratory, an eternal experiment. I typically ask myself why I keep exposing myself, why I keep pushing, when rejection is a constant companion. (Song is on VEVO Channel)
But then I sit down. I sit at the console, my fingers touch the keyboard, the Logic Pro software opens a window to another world. And a torrent flows from me: melody, words, arrangement, voice. I vanish. The length of a thought becomes my only unit of measure. Time is outlived.
When I return to reality, I realize that eight or ten hours have passed—pure, immeasurable meditation. Only then do I see the product. What to do with it? I don't know. But I know it has to go. It has to go out. It lands on YouTube, because I’ve shut down social media. The same goes for writing my blogs, and for shooting videos, films.
I have a need. Still, just as during the war, I feel a duty to give myself to Croatia. Now I do it through music and film. I love electronic music, indie pop, and I play and explore there. But a part of me, still guarded, I leave for patriotic songs. Because that passion from the room and that duty from the battlefield, ultimately, have just become different notes in the same, never-ending, symphony.
That's where “Fourteen Barriers” was born. It's a song, and it's also a documentary film. The film is the heart of it all. It’s a documentary, but I wanted it to feel like a powerful story for an English-speaking audience. I knew it was rare for a Croatian artist to write and sing a patriotic song in English. It was an experiment, a way to reach a wider audience, to show people the human side of war and resilience. I even used the song as a kind of trailer for the film, a sneak peek for international viewers. People were confused. They couldn't understand why I would do something so unusual. But I knew exactly what I was doing. I was creating a new channel for myself, a way to express the talent I never had the chance to formally develop.
This project isn’t a business venture; it’s a soul journey. I'm an amateur, sure, but my passion is real. I took the pain of my past and the unfulfilled dreams and used them as fuel. I took my war story, his love story, and the narrative of my film and wove them all together into something new, something that would not only help me heal but also inspire others. This is a story about finding your voice after it's been silenced, a story of hope and healing, and a testament to the power of improvisation when you're trying to reclaim your life.
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