Earning a buzzy spot in San Sebastián’s New Directors platform, the debut feature of writer-director Josip Žuvan sets a comic tale of childhood friendship and family feuding against a Christmas backdrop in coastal Croatia. Preteens Nikola and Antonio (Franko Floigl and Mauro Ercegović Gracin) are next-door neighbours and best friends. Bored and on winter holiday in their ho-hum provincial suburb, they aspire to internet fame by YouTubing destruction delivered by homemade pyrotechnics. The boys’ families, meanwhile, engage in their own form of fireworks: a fiery dispute over an innocuous water-drainage problem stands in for a deeper hurt dating back decades. Deftly combining coming-of-age tropes with ruminations on inherited conflict and Croatian society at the crossroads of modernity, Žuvan’s incisive film is the latest in a wave of acclaimed Croatian pictures earning festival attention in recent years.