Geraniums Can Survive Anything

A monotone grey sea of houses lies before the young man and his girlfriend. Day in, day out, they sit on their roof and dream themselves far away from here – out of a life in which they see no other future for themselves than the same path through the same stairwell. An aeroplane takes off above them every few minutes, a symbol of departure and freedom. One day they too want to dare to leave everything behind, the poverty, the dreariness, the grey. 

The girl takes the step first. The young man stays behind alone and sits looking up at the sky, obsessively noting every plane that flies over his head. The more he imagines himself far away, the more his mother tries to anchor him back in the bleak everyday life of the high-rise housing estate. She desperately tries to pretend that his father hasn’t already checked out of life beyond the sofa, as if staying here were still an option. She introduces him to people on every floor of the building, but nothing helps to pull the young man out of the deep depression he has sunk into since losing his friend.

Laconic and with a fine sense for bizarre situations and encounters, in Geraniums Can Survive Anything, Iva Brdar describes the longing for the future and a path to it that always goes around in circles. The community seethes as though under a burning lens, a microcosm of social and political problems. A vaguely perceptible abyss lurks in the middle of this neighbourhood because the young man’s friend’s big step went over the edge of the roof and was nowhere near as self-determined as it looked.