RUMPUS

Creator’s statement

This series is inspired by everyday news from the border between Croatia and Bosnia, the swampy area which has recently become a migrant route and a scene of various criminal activities. The bleak marshy landscape by a small town sunken in despair and decay is the ideal backdrop for this crime thriller story, in which reality cannot be separated from a mystical legend. This is where I bring my protagonist MAJA, a police woman who accepts the position of a detective in her hometown. Even though she is there only because of a better salary, she will eventually wake up and finally feel alive, the intense investigation hindered by the superstition of the townspeople, distrust of her colleagues, clumsy attempt of the local teenagers to find the culprit and the interests of the local tycoon will arouse spite in her and the determination she thought long gone. The story ends with the arrest of VIKTOR and his realization that, by the illegal disposal of chemical waste, he himself has affected the health of his beloved son. Children are an important narrative line in this series. Not only the teenagers with whom Maja makes a pact, but the children which are born with damages caused by toxic waste which is disposed in the swamp, the boy whose murder she is investigating and the child she desperately wants, which is the reason why she has returned to her hometown. Awakened maternal, protective instincts will give her the strength she didn’t know she had. The horror element, RUMPUS, an ancient negative hero, embodies the eternal presence of evil and is a reminder of the rising darkness and its confirmation. The visual world I want to build will suggest that the legend of Rumpus may not be just a legend, and I intend to keep that feel to the very end of the series.