The rules of engagement are unclear and shifting, as the war has not ended in terms of the memories and continued invisible lines that haunt and define relationships in Bosnia’s capital. As conflict erupts, some love contenders express discomfort at feeling like guinea pigs in an experiment. We as audience onlookers must consider, faced with the wide variation of attitudes and responses from those gathered for the hotel all-dyaer, what a lab for reconciliation would really take. Bold and outside-the-box, this humanistic, dynamic dissection of a traumatic legacy of ethno-nationalist militarism in the Balkans and its ongoing individual costs is the latest from Teona Strugar Mitevska in a directing career spanning more than two decades. She has often dealt with identity and value clashes, in mid-profile festival films including When the Day Had No Name (2017), a critique of Balkan machismo based on a murder in Skopje that inflamed ethnic tensions, and God Exists, Her Name is Petrunija (2019), about a young woman whose retrieval of a cross from the water in an annual contest challenges the Orthodox Church patriarchy. 

Attendees at the latest round of Touch of Happiness must all change into uniforms with sickly pink and green colour schemes, to enhance a sense of cohesion. They may all look of a part, but their stories are harder to reconcile, it soon emerges, as we hone in particularly on one pair. Asja (played as a tough but compassionate presence by Jelena Kordic) is a 45-year-old legal adviser, who considers her career her biggest achievement in life, and throws herself into the assigned dating tasks with the same no-nonsense, pro-active commitment. Though she seems put-together, she struggles, as the offspring of a Serb Orthodox mother and a Muslim father, with a sense of fractured belonging. She’s been matched up with Zoran, an on-edge 43-year-old who works in a bank (an intense Adnan Omerovic). Their preferences put them, promisingly, on the same page — until Zoran confesses that in the war, he was a member of the Army of the Republika Srpska for three years, and shot at his own city. What is more, he thinks he may have hit and injured Asja, who was living near the frontline while Sarajevo was under constant sniper fire. The room swims woozily around her, as we take a dive into more psychologically challenging terrain. Effective visual and aural approximations recreate the impact of trauma and its flashbacks. Contradictory urges to process and to forget, to punish and to be absolved crash up against one another (her desired superpower is to read thoughts and understand; his is amnesia.) As immobilised by shame and self-loathing as he is averse to real responsibility (the title is ironic, of course), Adnan is not portrayed without sympathy, though Mitevska does not let this broken and haunted perpetrator off too easily as another war victim who bowed to herd mentality. 

Aside from a gorgeous end shot that lingers over Sarajevo’s skyline as the day darkens like an oil painting, we are holed up scene after scene in the hotel, which works well to create a sense of dislocation from normality and an intensifying claustrophobia. Rooms named after the Swiss cities of Zurich and Basel bring no reassuring illusion of neutrality or affluent security to calm the hallucinatory breaks from reality (imaginatively actualised on screen in choreographed group performance). As painful memories start to flow out, movement and fully being in one’s own body in the present, scars and all, also becomes a way to liberation, as Asja dances for release.

Director: Teona Strugar Mitevska
Writers: Elma Tataragic, Teona Strugar Mitevska
Producers: Labina Mitevska, Sebastien Delloye, Danijel Hocevar, Maria Moller Christoffersen, Vanja Sremac, Amra Baksic Camo, Adis Dapo
Editors: Per K. Kirkegaard
Cinematography: Virginie Saint Martin
Cast: Jelena Kordicc Kuret, Adnan Omerovic, Ksenija Marinkovic, Izudin Bajrovic
Sound: Ingrid Simon, Kristoffer Salting, Viktor Grabar
Production Design: Vuk Mitevski
Costume Design: Monika Lorber
Production companies: Sisters and Brother Mitevski (Macedonia), Entre Chien et Loup (Belgium), Vertigo (Slovenia), Frau film (Denmark), Terminal 3 (Croatia), SCCA/pro.ba (Bosnia and Herzegovina), Belga Productions (Belgium)
Sales: Pyramide International
Venue: Sarajevo (Dealing With the Past)
In Bosnian
95 minutes

The Film Verdict at Sarajevo Film Festival 2023.

HEART OF SARAJEVO FOR BEST DIRECTOR
Philip Sotnychenko, LA PALISIADA
Ukraine

HEART OF SARAJEVO FOR BEST ACTRESS
Ekaterine Chavleishvili, BLACKBIRD BLACKBIRD BLACKBERRY
Georgia, Switzerland

HEART OF SARAJEVO FOR BEST ACTOR
Jovan Ginic, LOST COUNTRY
Serbia, France, Croatia, Luxembourg, Qatar

HEART OF SARAJEVO FOR BEST DOCUMENTARY FILM
BOTTLEMEN
Serbia, Slovenia
Director: Nemanja Vojinovic

HEART OF SARAJEVO FOR BEST SHORT DOCUMENTARY FILM
VALERIJA
Croatia
Director: Sara Jurincic

HUMAN RIGHTS AWARD
SILENCE OF REASON
North Macedonia, Bosnia and Herzegovina
Director: Kumjana Novakova

SPECIAL JURY AWARD
FAIRY GARDEN
Hungary, Romania, Croatia
Director: Gergo Somogyvári

HEART OF SARAJEVO FOR BEST SHORT FILM
27
Hungary, France
Director: Flóra Anna Buda

HEART OF SARAJEVO FOR BEST STUDENT FILM
FALLING
Hungary, Belgium, Portugal
Director: Anna Gyimesi

JURY SPECIAL MENTION
SHORT CUT GRASS
Croatia
Director: David Gašo

SPECIAL AWARD FOR PROMOTING GENDER EQUALITY
DE FACTO
Austria, Germany
Director: Selma Doborac

Cobbled together from scraps of mismatched building materials to keep the elements at bay, the makeshift construction could scarcely be called a house. Yet it is home for sixty-year-old Laci and his nineteen-year-old trans housemate Fanni, who he has welcomed in to share the space after her parents kicked her out and she repeatedly ran away from a state care institute. She cuts a vulnerable figure, as she totters through the mud in a flimsy dress with just a suitcase and a couple of bags. The hardened-looking, bespectacled Laci acts as a support to her as she goes through the gruelling ups and downs of hormone therapy for her transition. Their bond, an oasis free of judgment in a nation that has rejected them for who they are, also alleviates his own loneliness. There is much warmth apparent under their bickering and wisecracks as this oddly matched pair of misfits carry out the daily, practical tasks of survival as a chosen family. 

The ejection of Laci and Fanni from society into this quasi-wilderness offers a damning vision, in literal terms, of Hungary’s failed duty of care to its most disadvantaged citizens under Viktor Orban’s hardline right-wing government, which in 2018 criminalised rough sleeping in public places, and in 2021 outlawed the changing of gender on official documents, amid a wave of propaganda against LGBTQ+ people and the homeless. Fairy Garden ultimately comes off somewhat slight in its observational looseness, as it struggles to give a propulsive order to moments of lives of few options orbiting each other in a purposeless drift. Nonetheless it succeeds admirably, through its focus on two distinctive and likeable personalities, in giving visibility and a human face to the people this wave of hate has pushed underground. It celebrates their resilient determination to live on their own authentic terms in the most challenging of conditions, and documents how an alternative mode of community, however fragile and lacking in resources, can operate with intersectional solidarity outside official channels to combat stigmatisation and oppression. With committed humanism and politically engaged courage to call out the emboldening of violent discrimination by the state, the documentary vividly conveys how desperate life has become in Hungary for those targeted by propaganda and exclusionary laws. 

Fanni live-streams about her life from the forest, clocking up an audience of both fans and abusive trolls, her elaborate make-up and dresses a glaring contrast with the off-grid campsite environs. Her online instalments punctuate footage of the housemates’ building endeavours and time smoking and talking together. Backstory is sparse and comes in snatches, Fanni’s embittered reference to her parents joining forces with locals to drive her out of her hometown painting a picture of a climate of brutal bigotry in which details are largely too painful to discuss. A fear of physical attacks restricts her movements, but she connects online with a stylist who enlists her to model for a fashion shoot, and a male fan who wants to meet for sex. Fetishisation of difference and limited means to vet and set boundaries with those logging on to her stream with self-interested and questionable motives are phenomenons impacting Fanni’s emergent identity and safety amid the precarity of her grinding poverty. She discusses her reluctance to enter sex work due to the risks, but it’s one of few available financial sources open to her. The documentary avoids a crushing, downbeat conclusion after Laci’s health declines, as romantic love and a more stable alternative family for Fanni enter the horizon.

Director, cinematographer: Gergo Somogyvari
Screenplay: Zsolt Pocsai, Gergo Somogyvari
Producers: Nora Somogyvari, Gergo Somogyvari
Editor: Judit Feszt
Music: Viktor Bakti
Sound Design: Florin Tabacaru, Marius Lefterache
Production companies: New Retina Productions (Hungary), Avanpost (Romania), Restart (Croatia), Campfilm (Hungary)
Sales: Journeyman Pictures (UK)
Venue: Sarajevo (Documentary Competition)
In Hungarian
83 minutes

The Film Verdict at Sarajevo Film Festival 2023.

There is a tangible sadness that persists in the air here, inevitably sensed by audiences attending the Sarajevo Film Festival, even as they immerse themselves in the heady party atmosphere of long Balkan nights. A showcase for new regional cinema, and a buzzing hub for forged collaborations in its well-attended Cinelink Industry Days, the festival is also very conscious of the role it has to play in reconciliation and healing of former Yugoslavia’s painful past. This intentionally comes to the fore in its programming decisions and preference for politically committed, rigorous work — a festival identity felt more than ever in its 29th edition, with a number strong new competition films in this vein gaining awards recognition.

What’s more, an unforeseen National Day of Mourning in the middle of the week, in the aftermath of a brutal femicide and protests around Bosnia, upended the schedule but occasioned a strong show of solidarity with the victims of gender-based violence from the festival team and attendees.

The Heart of Sarajevo for Best Feature Film, chosen by a five-person jury led by Australian actress Mia Wasikowska, went to Georgian director Elene Naveriani’s Blackbird Blackbird Blackberry, a wry celebration of feminist non-conformity, which premiered in Cannes. In addition, its star, Ekaterine Chavleishvili, came away with the Best Actress award. The prizes will be a morale boost for a Georgian film industry currently in turmoil and struggling against repressive state intervention.

Sarajevo opened on an emotional high note, with packed multi-venue screenings of Kiss the Future, Ninad Cicin-Sain’s documentary about the music underground that flourished in 90’s Sarajevo despite, or indeed because of, the 1,425-day siege of the capital by Serb forces. The film traces the background of the first major concert in the city afterward, when rock band U2 dared to come.

The 90s were revisited, too, in several of the strongest features in competition. Vladimir Perisic’s devastating coming-of-age drama Lost Country, for which Jovan Gonic won Best Actor, is set when politician Slobodan Milosevic was consolidating power, and reckons with a Serbia generationally torn apart and imperiled by ethno-nationalism. Best Director went to Philip Sotnychenko for his oblique and fragmentary La Palisiada, which takes place between that tumultuous decade and the current day. Through an inventive take on the police procedural, it explores a legacy of Soviet, state-sanctioned violence passed down to young Ukrainian artists. How trauma and old fears circumscribe the present was also the theme of Sarajevo-born director Una Gunjak’s Excursion, screening out of competition, another memorable coming-of-ager, the focus of which is as much society’s struggles as it is the teen at its heart.

The power imbalances of an era of aggressive market capitalism in Europe were another preoccupation of the competition programmes. World premiere Europa, directed by Austrian-Iranian director Sudabeh Mortezai, highlights the anxieties and neo-colonial exploitation of those marginalised in the European Union. Fresh and satirical, this dystopian thriller depicts a shadowy conglomerate that tries to take over land in Albania for its operations. In the doc line-up, Best Documentary winner Nemanja Vojinovic’s Bottlemen, dubbed an “ecological western,” shows low-wage trash heap workers scrabbling to subsist in Serbia, while Croatia’s Goran Devic delivered a playfully self-aware take on workplace union battles in What’s to be Done?

Two notable films are unflinching and courageous in confronting some of the worst atrocities of the Bosnian War. Through their reconfiguration of war crimes testimony and their formally audacious experimental approaches, Bosnian filmmaker Selma Doborac’s De Facto, and Macedonian documentarian Kumjana Novakova’s Silence of Reason, were two of the most psychologically demanding, yet masterfully impressive, films to be seen in the festival — very different from one another, yet almost complementary in the way they both contribute to a wider dialogue of resistance voices and methods of addressing and processing past horrors. De Facto was awarded the Special Award for Promoting Gender Equality, while Silence of Reason came away with the Human Rights Award.

Meanwhile, Self-Portrait Along the Borderline is a stand-out essayistic exploration of the fractured nature of relations between Georgia and Abkhazia through director Anna Dziapshipa’s own heritage and identity. It contributed further to the impression many of this year’s best competition films were documentaries, made with a particular sensitivity and feel for poetry.

Out of Competition, noteworthy work was to be found in the Dealing with the Past section, an annual sidebar to facilitate the processing of regional history. It included found-footage virtuoso Jean-Gabriel Periot’s Facing Darkness, which shows the 90’s Siege of Sarajevo through the eyes of those who shot footage there, and those who went off to fight. The March on Rome, which charts through archives the rise and self-mythologising of Mussolini’s Fascist regime in Italy, also screened. It was made by Mark Cousins, who was honoured with a Heart of Sarajevo award for his contribution to the art of film, and who also gave a typically heartfelt masterclass.

But it wasn’t all heaviness and historical horror in the Sarajevo line-up. A powerhouse masterclass series of big names boasted leading arthouse auteurs Jessica Hausner and Lynne Ramsay. Writer and director Charlie Kaufman packed out the large Bosnian Cultural Center auditorium for an endearing session of his trademark wit and anxiety-tinged existentialism, with bracing words of support for the Writers’ Strike and an impassioned rejection of AI. Other corners, like the Kinoscope Surreal sidebar, were not short on well-crafted, poppy genre splashes, including U.S. director Jennifer Reeder’s smart feminist body-horror Perpetrator.

Then mid-week, a National Day of Mourning brought all festival events grinding to a halt, following a brutal femicide in the Bosnian town of Gradacac and protests over gender-based violence, policing and judicial failures. All public screenings, talks and social events were called off, with the exception of a panel on “Femicide in Film, Television and New Media,” pulled together at short notice.

A logistical scramble ensued, as the festival team worked to reschedule all that was missed on the closing days. Premieres were pushed back, but filmmakers attending overwhelmingly supported the move to stop for one day, and the willingness of the festival to make a strong stand of solidarity with the marginalised in a manner that could not go unnoticed. It was a timely reminder to all attendees that the global problems of the past are very much alive in the present.

Awards of the 29th Sarajevo Film Festival:

HEART OF SARAJEVO FOR BEST FEATURE FILM
BLACKBIRD BLACKBIRD BLACKBERRY
Georgia, Switzerland
Director: Elene Naveriani

HEART OF SARAJEVO FOR BEST DIRECTOR
Philip Sotnychenko, LA PALISIADA
Ukraine

HEART OF SARAJEVO FOR BEST ACTRESS
Ekaterine Chavleishvili, BLACKBIRD BLACKBIRD BLACKBERRY
Georgia, Switzerland

HEART OF SARAJEVO FOR BEST ACTOR
Jovan Ginic, LOST COUNTRY
Serbia, France, Croatia, Luxembourg, Qatar

HEART OF SARAJEVO FOR BEST DOCUMENTARY FILM
BOTTLEMEN
Serbia, Slovenia
Director: Nemanja Vojinovic

HEART OF SARAJEVO FOR BEST SHORT DOCUMENTARY FILM
VALERIJA
Croatia
Director: Sara Jurincic

HUMAN RIGHTS AWARD
SILENCE OF REASON
North Macedonia, Bosnia and Herzegovina
Director: Kumjana Novakova

SPECIAL JURY AWARD
FAIRY GARDEN
Hungary, Romania, Croatia
Director: Gergo Somogyvari

HEART OF SARAJEVO FOR BEST SHORT FILM – eligible for Oscar® nomination
27
Hungary, France
Director: Flora Anna Buda

HEART OF SARAJEVO FOR BEST STUDENT FILM
FALLING
Hungary, Belgium, Portugal
Director: Anna Gyimesi

JURY SPECIAL MENTION
SHORT CUT GRASS
Croatia
Director: David Gaso

SPECIAL AWARD FOR PROMOTING GENDER EQUALITY
DE FACTO
Austria, Germany
Director: Selma Doborac

Made by documentarian Giorgi Parkosadze, the film was previously selected for the Docu Rough Cut Boutique – a development initiative run by Sarajevo Film Festival and the Balkan Documentary Centre – where it won the DOK Leipzig Preview Award. Now, this patient and beautiful and sensitive film returns to have its world premiere as a part of Sarajevo’s 2023 edition. A delicate but deceptively thought-provoking gem, it competes in the perennially interesting documentary section of the main competition programme.

Parkosadze spent time creating his pastoral portrait across four years, during which he would effectively embed himself on the farm, living there with Sanata and Guri for periods of time. In interviews, he has spoken about feeling the need to contribute and so sometimes left his camera packed away for a day while collecting firewood or trying to make himself useful. The impact of this can be felt in the intimacy and easiness of the material he has captured. The physical descriptions of what the film entails are fairly mundane: Guri milks one of their cows, Sanata works the cheese curd, a mower engine is fixed, and an old leaking barn roof is stripped. Sometimes, Parkosadze’s camera just sits stationary as its subjects do, lazing indoors out of the summer heat. But all of these apparently unfussy shots are captured with an arresting authenticity.

It is a cliché to say that the landscape becomes almost something of a character throughout this, but in Parkosadze’s hands, it certainly exudes some intangible resonance. The image regularly cuts away from the workaday tasks being performed by the duo to cast its lens across the steep hillside fields, or the weft and weave of the valley. They tend to be lingering shots, usually with livestock the closest thing to a focal point, but it is the effect of the entire tableau that is so enthralling. The filmmaker’s eye seems drawn to the ways the weather caresses their homestead – a couple of shots with drifting mist are particularly evocative – and on occasion, a shot that seems to be just cattle in a field reveals itself to contain Sanata or Guri, watching their charges, or wrangling them with the help of one of the farm’s characterful dogs.

The way that the characters disappear into their environs seems to speak volumes about the kind of longstanding bond they have with this landscape. It is interesting that Requiem to the Hot Days of Summer premieres alongside a short documentary at Sarajevo, Fran and Verka; or A Usual Day in an Abandoned Village, in which an ageing couple live a similarly secluded life in an abandoned Kosovan village they refuse to vacate. Both films ostensibly depict a place from which most people have now departed and are interested in the ones that remain – but the way Parkosadze subtly elides the people and locale of his film suggests a more potent force keeping Sanata and Guri tied to Vakisofeli. This is particularly true for Guri, who is clearly devoted to his mother.

Some of the press materials for the film frame it as the portrait of a mother-son bond, and it certainly is that, though perhaps not a typical way. At its most fundamental, Requiem shows the comfort and familiarity that are the upshot of more than 20 years of such proximity. Both mother and son speak sparingly, only when language is required to elucidate something, but Parkosadze finds a moving contentment in the silences during which neither feels compelled to say anything. Several scenes in which they sit together, uncommunicative, are redolent with the sense of familial understanding in a way that is not always easy to convey on screen. The implication of all this is a reaffirmation of Guri’s consistent presence on the farm, despite the pull of the nearby town where they sell their wares, Dusheti.

In fact, the potential departure of Guri, while never explicitly addressed in a conversation between the two of them, does encroach on the idyll of the withdrawn rustic in several different ways. Perhaps the most obvious of these is during the visit of two young Belgians who stay with them for one summer to learn more about a farming lifestyle. Amaury and Jasmijn are in their twenties and have a ready rapport with Guri – in one sequence the three of them discuss career possibilities in English, with Guri imaging becoming a software engineer and CEO.

Whether Sanata is able to follow their conversation or not remains tantalisingly unclarified. But with a girlfriend of Guri’s later entering the scenario, and Parkosadze choosing to conclude his film with a winter sequence in which the farm is silent and laden with snow, the future seems uncertain. The word ‘Requiem’ in the film’s title suggests a lament for something lost, and while the ‘hot days of summer’ might be the heyday of smallholder farming, it may also refer to the shifting tides of a mother’s primacy in her son’s life. That such nuances are redolent in a film that might at first glance seem quaint and simplistic, only heightens its poignancy.

Director, cinematography: Giorgi Parkosadze
Producers: Tamta Tvalavadze, Angelos Tsaousis
Editing: Fernando Restelli, Giorgi Parkosadze
Sound: Beso Kacharava, Giorgi Murghulia, Mariam Dieser
Production: Attic Production (Georgia), Filmografik Productions (Greece)
Venue: Sarajevo Film Festival (Competition Programme – Documentary Film)
In Georgian
75 minutes

A capsule summary of What’s to be Done? makes it sound like a daunting slab of drab, all earnest social realism and flinty ideological dogma, especially as it borrows its title from one of Lenin’s best-known pre-revolutionary pamphlets. But Devic and his team have some playful aces up their sleeve, including a colourful leading man in the form of union organiser Zelijko Starcevic, plus a few stylistic tricks that elevate newsy reportage into more left-field docu-fiction territory. A fine-grained examination of how industrial policy plays out on a political, emotional and psychological level, this artfully crafted documentary is playful and polished enough to engage casual viewers, with further festival interest very likely.

Not a man burdened by too much modesty, Zeljko is a gift to the film-makers, a natural performer whose years of union experience have clearly honed his flair for rabble-rousing oratory and attention-grabbing street theatre. When first discussing crisis negotiations with management, he flips between smooth-talking officialese and pugnacious picket-line rhetoric. “I will definitely confront them in a cultured and intelligent way,” he assures his co-workers, “I won’t tell them to go fuck themselves.” Later, in the angry aftermath of bankruptcy and mass redundancies, he breaks back into the factory to salvage his old protest banners. “This is human evil at its worst,” he rages on camera.

Ever the savvy political operator, we later find Zeljko cheerleading for a newly elected right-wing government minister, Tomislav Karamarko, whose promises to help the abandoned Gredelj workers inevitably come to nothing. Devic’s film does not cover this but Karamarko’s ministerial career imploded in a corruption scandal mere months later, helping to bring down the entire Croatian government. As the years pass, Zeljko exhibits more conciliatory warmth towards former workplace rivals he once threatened to punch on the nose. How much of this is performative and how much sincere is a moot point, but he remains a lively, larger-than-life screen presence throughout.

In its final stages, What’s to be Done? moves beyond the grammar of a standard observational documentary into a more self-aware, meta-film mode. After nine years of shooting, film crew and cast gather to review their earlier footage. This meeting becomes a cathartic group therapy session of regretful confession and tearful reconciliation. In a delightful closing flourish, Devic takes several former workers back to the semi-derelict Gredelj factory to stage a short musical memorial to their past lives, an oddly moving blend of modern dance and performance art set to a mournful choral piece by composer Arvo Pärt. More of these stylised Brechtian interludes would have been very welcome, but this is still a sublime coda to a fine film.

Director, screenwriter: Goran Devic
Cinematography: Damian Nenadic
Editing: Iva Kraljevic
Producer: Hrvoje Osvadic
Production company: Petnaesta Umjetnost (Croatia)
Venue: Sarajevo Film Festival (Documentary competition)
In Croatian
79 minutes

Her first two features, Macondo (2014) and Joy (2018), dealt with immigrant experience in Vienna, the latter a particularly uncompromising depiction of the lack of options available to a trafficked Nigerian sex worker. Her third feature, screening in the Feature Competition at Sarajevo, revisits these concerns with a broad, structural focus on the pathways of shady “philanthropy.” Situated between a pitch-black, neo-colonial satire and a dystopian thriller about unscrupulous greed, this is a tonally elusive but politically trenchant and original oddity. Its title references the brutally acquisitive, arrogantly paternalistic corporation at its core, helmed by Beate (Lilith Stangenberg), a prim and pale Germanic executive. As Europa sinks its teeth into Albania, a stigmatised and economically challenged non-EU member state viewed as a resource that is there for the taking, the expansionist firm functions as a caustic symbol of the European Union and its failures.

“All communication is manipulation,” says Beate. Joined by her equally charmless assistant Lasse (Tobias Winter) and beleaguered interpreter, Albi (Mirando Sylari), she is on an extended business trip to the small Balkan nation, where she has been tasked with persuading local farmers to sign their properties over to Europa for large pay-outs. Smooth persuasion is her strategy, but she can barely disguise her smug superiority, as she dupes family patriarchs that she wants nothing more than to secure their children’s futures. She’s armed with the added carrot of lucrative university scholarships, couched as a means of empowering young Albanian women.

Jetnor (played with a stubborn, steady gaze by Jetnor Gorezi) is one dad who cannot be bought. His land, and the bees he keeps, were inherited from his father, who died of cancer from toxic chemical exposure after being forced into factory work by the state. Failing to convince Jetnor directly, Beate seeks influence through regeneration donations to the Islamic Sufi order Bektashi (he’s a devout follower), and via his more malleable daughter Besa (Steljona Kadillari), who wears a “Brooklyn” T-shirt and dreams of studying abroad. Her outward-looking hunger for opportunity has not yet been tainted by cynical realities. But Europa’s machinations to get landowners on side is merely for public relations optics, to minimise ugly fall-out. They will seize the land no matter what, having secured ownership deeds through a corrupt legal system. 

Least credible is a schematic narrative strand where a group of European tourists, urban explorers who have trespassed on zoned off Europa territory, are locked up by armed guards. (In line with their respective nations’ EU fortunes, the Danish prisoner appeals to her Scandanavian privileges, while the Greek rebels.) Cue echoes of the refugee crisis, and control of movement.  

The upmarket hotel with mood jazz for suited clientele where Beate and Lasse spend their downtime (she with yoga and family Zooms; he with a sex worker) is shot by D.P. Klemens Hufnagl as a space of impersonal globalisation and consumerist optimisation, in stark contrast to Albania’s verdant hills, sundrenched in long shots, where they are driven to negotiations. Folk sounds out there, tying the land to tradition. A stop-off at former communist regime bunkers, now in disrepair and used for sheep shelters, is a chance for their guide to voice another historical layer to the persecution of Albania’s landowners over decades of Enver Hoxha’s rule. 

Scenes in which the insistent, abundant hospitality of Raki toasts and lamb dishes straight from the slaughter come up against the unbending stiffness of the visitors play for predictable but effective laughs, as beyond a culture clash, lies a basic deficit of respect. A consolatory solution was never to be. The whole film is essentially a flashback, setting out the backstory for a chaotic, dynamic cracker of an opening scene of confrontation, as a man on a moving car’s bonnet smashes a windscreen. There is no road to a harmonious Europe to be found here — despite whatever line the spokespeople of neo-imperialist power are eager to sell, as they frame ransacking as development.

Director, screenplay: Sudabeh Mortezai
Cast: Lilith Stangenberg, Jetnor Gorezi, Steljona Kadillari, Mirando Sylari, Tobias WinterProducers: Mehrdad Mortezai, Sudabeh Mortezai
Cinematography: Klemens Hufnagl
Editor: Julia Drack
Sound Design: Atanas Tcholakov
Set Design: Julia Libiseller
Costume Design: Carola Pizzini
Production companies: Fratella Filmproduktion GmbH (Austria), Good Chaos (UK), Film4 (UK)
Sales: Memento International
Venue: Sarajevo Film Festival (Feature Competition)
In Albanian, English, German
97 minutes

The Film Verdict at Sarajevo Film Festival 2023.

In the place of scheduled events, a public panel on the topic of “Femicide in Film, Television and New Media” was held on the Festival Square, in which filmmakers Aida Begic, Vanja Juranic, Kumjana Novakova and Ademir Kenovic, and actress Nadine Micic critically discussed the normalisation of gender-based violence, and how it has been tackled on screen.

On Friday, the day the festival opened, Nermin Sulejmanovic live-streamed the murder of his ex-wife, Nizama Hecimovic, on Instagram, shooting her before killing two other people and himself. It was viewed by 12,000 people, and received 126 likes. Meta, Instagram’s owner, has since removed the footage from its platform.

A dimension of the brutal killing that particularly enraged the public was that Hecimovic had already reported Sulejmanovic, who had prior arrests on his record, to the police for harassment and violence, and had not been granted a restraining order.

Demonstrations erupted in several Bosnian cities. Protestors walked through the centre of Sarajevo, drawing attention to a culture of silence around gender-based violence, and failures in the policing and judicial system to adequately protect women. Human Rights Minister Sevlid Hurtic has called for a new law which would see femicide recognized as a specific crime.

Macedonian director Kumjana Novakova was in Sarajevo for Tuesday’s world premiere of her documentary Silence of Reason, which uses Hague war crimes testimony to reckon with violence against women as a systematic weapon of the Bosnian War, and the reclassification of rape and sexual slavery as crimes against humanity after survivors broke their silence.

A participant in Wednesday’s panel, she told The Film Verdict: “I am really moved to see a major industry festival making a decision to simply stop because we have to reflect and articulate on an emergency that requires the strength and solidarity among all of us, and that is far more important than the “everyday” issues of the festival. This sets up an example that a break and change of paradigm is possible. We can and we will mobilize in order to voice a concern of social importance.”

“I also would like to insist on the fact that we who work in film or arts and culture in general cannot replace systemic responsibilities, but we can and will exercise pressure,” Novakova added.

Croatian director Vanja Juranic, another panel participant, was at the festival to show her film Only When I Laugh, inspired by the real-life case of a woman, Ana Magas, sent to jail for killing her husband after she endured years of domestic abuse. Presenting the film, which she called “a universal story about a woman trapped in a patriarchal environment,” she dedicated the screening to the Gradacac victims.

Sarajevo Film Festival initially announced that they would put a halt only to red carpet and social events to mark the Day of Mourning, before expanding the cancellation across almost all its schedule on Wednesday. A number of competition premieres scheduled for today have been pushed back, including the world premiere of Austrian-Iranian director Sudabeh Mortezai’s Europa, and the Bosnian premiere of Romanian documentarian Vlad Petri’s Between Revolutions.

“I think the decision taken today by Sarajevo Film Festival to cancel all the public screenings is an important step to raise awareness regarding the horrific recent murder that happened in Bosnia. It is also a necessary step for a festival that deals with the recent history, a festival that connects the past with the present,” Petri told The Film Verdict.

“I was looking forward for the today’s screening of Between Revolutions since this is a film that deals with the past and with the lives of women and the audiences here are really engaging and keen to question the filmmakers,” said Petri. “But I see the bigger picture, the life of a woman was recently lost and we should all stop today for a minute, an hour or more to reflect on the recent horrific events. Thank you Sarajevo Film Festival for doing this!”

The Film Verdict at Sarajevo Film Festival 2023.

Greetings Vlad, are you enjoying Sarajevo?

“Yes, it’s an amazing place! I’m really happy that I screen my film here, because it’s a city that connects the past with the present and the East with the West. So it’s an amazing place to be.”

Between Revolutions has already won multiple awards and played numerous festivals, are you surprised that it seems to have such wide appeal?

“When I was researching this I didn’t know the film would have a universal appeal because it’s of course about Romania, and Iran. At the same time, I have to be honest, during the editing we were asking ourselves many questions regarding how much information should we put into the film about what happened in these two countries? In the end we decided it’s better to go on the more personal level of the story, a more intimate level, to let the film connect maybe to a wider audience.”

The film remains vague about whether its two female protagonsts are just close friends or ex-lovers. Was this deliberate?

“Yes, because we never see the women, we construct them from the text that we hear and read the screen. So the proximity of these bodies, we don’t know how close they are, or how far. Of course, me and the co-screenwriter Lavinia Braniste, we we thinking about all these stupid laws – in Romania it was Article 200, forbidding gay relationships. Also in Iran, during the Shah and after the revolution, these kind of relationships were forbidden. So we were thinking about the larger picture of these two countries, but we didn’t want it to state clearly if it’s if it’s a friendship or a love story. “

One of the film’s bleak messages is that all revolutionary victories can be “confiscated” by repressive, conservative forces. Do you think Romania’s bumpy rebirth after Communist dictatorship has failed as badly as Iran’s Islamic Revolution of 1979?

“I’m not putting them on the same level, it’s much more complicated than that. But for me the message of this film can be that we should be careful to who we give the liberty that we fight for, this precious freedom. In Romania the people from the same system took it, they put all the blame on Ceaucescu and his wife, they shot them, but it was the same people in power, you know? No trials, nothing. In Iran at the same time there was so much enthusiasm coming from all levels of society, I was so impressed with what I saw in the archives, and read about. Intellectuals, left wing people, all religions were on the streets. But it was confiscated by Khomeini. But I don’t put them on the same level. For Romania if course it meant an opening to the western world, for Iran unfortunately it went into a darker direction.”

Between Revolutions was made with help from collaborators in Iran, but you do not name them in the credits, was this to protect them from the regime?

“Yes. We had consultants, we talked a lot about the character of Zahra, and the archives, and how we integrated them. They saw the film, they really liked it and said they really would like to say they worked on this project for the whole world. But due to security reasons, it’s better to keep a low profile. Because the Iranian government, like many other very strong dictatorships, they really want to have their own version of history. They don’t want some other people to reinterpret their narratives, to take a closer look in the archives. So they really keep their archives behind an iron door with big lock.”

Is it true that an Iranian agent in Romania tried to question you during production?

“It was a very strange encounter, because he said he was a journalist, and I was curious to meet him. Because during that time I was also studying the Persian language, which I’m still doing. So for me, it was really interesting to talk with someone, to find out more about the culture. But he gradually became more like an investigator, like someone from the regime. He became more and more angry about this film, asking me things like why did I choose a female perspective? And asking me from where I got the funding. I really felt that I went back to Romania in the 1980s, with the Securitate and Ceausescu. It was really strange.”

Is there any chance Between Revolutions could screen in Iran?

“People told me there have been some underground screenings. And people were very interested, we got messages on our social media, young people saying they didn’t know about these archives, and they were so happy to see their past in a different way. We got really emotional and really interesting feedback from Iran, and we also heard there is a version on a Telegram channel translated into Farsi,”

You have travelled to Iran, and other Middle Eastern countries, and you are now learning Farsi. Where does this personal interest come from?

“I think it comes from the fact that I’m coming from Romania, which was seen and is still seen as a marginalised Eastern European country that experienced Communism for such a long time and is trying to find its own way in this capitalistic western world. For me, the Middle East was really interesting. I found similarities to Romanian society there, but also the fact that Romanians are only interested in the western narrative. What is outside? Outside is also Middle East, we have a border with Turkey. I was also fascinated by Iran. I was born in 1979, when the revolution happened in Iran. So I was questioning myself a lot of times: what would I have done if I had been there, or if a revolution like this would happen in my country? These are some of the connections I’ve made. I’m also fascinated by Iranian culture and cinema. There are similarities between Iranian and Romanian cinema, seeing the ways the directors portray reality and life.”

You made Between Revolutions before the Iranian regime murdered Mahsa Amini, and the ongoing Woman Life Freedom protests that followed. Do you see any connection between this new embyronic Iranian revolution and your film?

“I think there are many connections. I discovered images from 1979, that I shared with my Iranian friends and collaborators, and they said: wow! These images look so contemporary, they seem like they’re from now in Iran. At the same time, some younger people said they couldn’t believe that women were very vocal and fighting for their rights even in 1979. I have to be honest, we were at the final stages of editing when the Mahsa Amini protests started in Iran. We were very anxious and curious about what was happening with the protests in Tehran and other cities. Romanian society changed a lot since the revolution in the 1980s but in Iran it’s the same regime since Khomeini, it’s the same people there.”

These Iranian women and men who are protesting are amazingly brave. Do you think they have any chance of success?

“It’s really hard to say which direction things will go. Even for Iranians, who are more able to talk about these changes. I talked with people from Iran, and they say for so many months they could see so many women together, not wearing the mandatory hijab any more on the streets, in coffee shops and restaurants, which is a big deal when we think of the people that make these laws in Iran now. But from what I heard and read, things are slowly moving in not a very good direction, because they try to suppress more and more. For example, they give fines to restaurants if they allow a woman without a hijab inside. So it’s hard to predict. But it was one of the most impressive movements, not only in the Middle East, but in the whole world. Led by women and supported by men. Really impressive.”

Speaking of repressive regimes, Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine is happening right now, just next door to Romania. How should film-makers respond to this conflict?

“I can only talk from a film-maker’s point of view, but there are many projects and people, from Ukraine and from other countries, trying to shed light on what’s going on there. To make politicians open their eyes and do more to stop this very cruel and horrible conflict. I think cinema and culture can change things, they can challenge the narrative we have from TV and from mainstream media. That’s why I think cinema is such an important tool. We have to fight to reach to reach people in not so commercial forms – more artistic, different forms of cinema.”

Director, screenplay, editing: Sovran Nrecaj
Cinematography: Besim Ugzamijli
Producer: Aurela Kadriu
Production: Can and Cam (Kosovo)
Venue: Sarajevo Film Festival (Competition Programme – Documentary Film)
No dialogue
14 minutes

The breathtaking visual backdrop of Bottlemen is the Vinca landfill, a mountain of trash and rubble located on an ancient Neolithic settlement in the suburbs of Belgrade. Founded in the early 1970s, this vast man-made hellscape has since grown into Europe’s biggest rubbish dump and an ecological disaster area, ravaged by regular wildfires that send choking clouds of smog into the city. Trucks bring thousands of tons of garbage here every day, with teams of manual workers crowding around each new shipment to pick out items for recycling. Meanwhile, huge swarms of gulls swirl around them, scavenging for scraps of food.

Shooting across several seasons, Vojinovic frames this post-apocalyptic setting with a painterly eye, capturing its alien majesty and unexpected visual poetry. As shredded ribbons of plastic flutter in the summer breeze, the site resembles some kind of surreal sci-fi art installation. When winter snows fall, this towering inferno of stinking waste becomes a man-made alpine wonderland. The whirling masses of gulls also serve as a strong visual motif in Bottlemen, often filling the entire screen with their shrieks and swoops, inevitably invoking Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963) in places. There is horror here, but otherworldly beauty too.

Though mostly an observational portrait of a unique location, Bottlemen also has a tender human subtext. The focus of its loose narrative thread is Yani “Yanika” Boc, a taciturn former boxer who now works as a “bottleman” at the Vinca landfill. We first meet him as reluctant team leader to a gang tasked with scrabbling for plastic bottles to recycle and crush into giant processed cubes. But Yanika is clearly having serious doubts about this soul-draining job as relations turn sour with his increasingly hostile co-workers and harsh, demanding, remote bosses. He is also quietly struggling with more personal issues, including an ailing father and far-away children he rarely sees.

Bottlemen is light on historical context, political hinterland or character depth. Aside from a few skimpy on-screen captions, viewers learn very little of the Vinca landfill site’s past, present or future, and equally scant details about Yanika’s life. Sometimes this absence feels frustrating, reducing the film to a purely aesthetic, almost abstract artwork for long sections. That said, there are slow-burn emotional shadings and grace notes buried under these mountains of smouldering garbage.

In its later stages, Bottlemen emerges as a kind of bittersweet memorial. Vojinovic began shooting just as the Vinca landfill was entering a major transition phase. Long-in-gestation plans to reclaim, stabilise and modernise this unsanitary eyesore with a green-belt perimeter and a giant waste-energy power plant finally led to the closure of the old site in 2021. This film captures the end of an era, drawing elegiac echoes between the demise of Yanika’s former profession and more personal changes in his life. Besides Igor Marovic’s ravishing cinematography and frequently stunning visual choices, music is also a strong stylistic element, from wistful ambient soundscapes to boisterous blasts of turbo-folk, the Balkan region’s signature brand of cheerfully garish dance-pop.

Director, screenwriter: Nemanja Vojinovic
Producers: Marija Stojnic, Nemanja Vojinovic
Cinematography: Igor Marovic, Nemanja Vojinovic
Editing: Dragan Von Petrovic
Sound design: Bostjan Kacicnik
Music: Predrag Adamovic
Production companies: RT Dobre Nade (Serbia), Set Sail Films (Serbia), Urgh! (Slovenia)
World sales: Taskovski, London
Venue: Sarajevo Film Festival (Documentary competition)
In Serbian
84 minutes

Novakova’s work recognises that history is a seamless part of the lived present, and when it is heavy with unprocessed pain, it has a way of haunting the buildings and images that remain as reminders of the horror. She confronted the collective trauma that subsists in the landscape and community of Srebrenica, a town now synonymous with the 1995 genocide of Bosniak Muslims by Serb forces that became a defining event of twentieth-century inhumanity in Europe, in her feature documentary debut Disturbed Earth (2021), co-directed with Guillermo Carreras-Candi. Poetry and research rigour characterised that experimental work, which blended archive material with current-day footage of survivors. Silence of Reason is her first sole-directed feature. In it Novakova, again with great sensitivity, endeavours to find a language to record, represent and comprehend the atrocities of the war committed in Foca, a town in Eastern Bosnia subjected to an ethnic cleansing campaign at the hands of Serb military, police and paramilitary. 

Silence of Reason is about the mass rape and sexual enslavement of women specifically, and its use as a systemic weapon. It resists the false normalisation of rape as an inevitable symptom and side issue of armed conflict, and its marginalisation from official history and collective memory. The harrowing, relentless nature of the subject, combined with the documentary’s formal experimentation and not-so-standard length (it clocks in at just over a succinct hour) will make wide release prospects few, but the significance of this deftly crafted and assiduously researched, feminist reckoning with a taboo aspect of the Bosnian War that continues to shape the countries of the former Yugoslavia, and Novakova’s efforts toward a way forward, should garner the full attention of documentary festivals programming at the more challenging end of the spectrum. 

Masterfully assembled from forensic visual archive and women’s testimonies from the 2000 International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in the Hague, Silence of Reason overlays the accounts of rape survivors in text and identity-disguised voiceover onto still images and recorded footage of the sites of their terrorisation, once-idyllic village spots having surrealistically morphed in the upside-down hell of war into crime scenes. Bleached-out hues and staticky noise lend to a nightmarish sense of dread and distortion as these ‘90s traces swim in and out of our focus and consciousness like ghostly materials, while memories are non-sensationalistically, methodically revisited. Mirroring avoidant dissociation and the bodily intensity of traumatic recall, images blur and sharpen. These are things almost impossible to talk about, that survivors say they have tried to forget. The inexact contours of experiences too much to sit within come to us in clipped fragments. Rain on the camera lens in a storm is, at the same time, sensorially vivid.

Fragments from records reference bodies found on the bank of the Drina river, who buried them, and where. Identifying details (a red earring with three white stones, for instance) evoke with a jolt, among this data, the loss of individual personalities. Accounts tell in snatches the story of the campaign, from the time the atmosphere of the town shifted with the Serb capture of it, and neighbours stopped meeting with Bosniaks, to the rounding up and depositing of women in rape camps (converted from houses and the school) where they were repeatedly violated, under full knowledge and participation of the local police. The accumulative effect of these spare, unbearable testimonies in their repetition, is recognition of a pervasive control method to break spirits. One teenager, sold for 500 German marks and a truckload of washing powder, describes being trafficked to Montenegro, the black-bordered, compact frame feeding a sense of claustrophobic entrapment, even as the landscape rolls by vertiginously, shot from a moving car.

“We have to combat all impulses that mythologise the horrible,” is the film’s opening quote from Hannah Arendt, the Jewish philosopher and reporter who famously covered the 1961 trial of Nazi war criminal and Holocaust implementer Adolf Eichmann. Novakova joins forces with a legacy of feminist thinkers, artists and activists contributing to the gruelling project of researching and resisting sexual violence against women (in an end title, she thanks all similarly involved in this work). She amplifies the voices of the survivors who had the courage to go on the record and in so doing changed how certain atrocities are classed in international law, so that rape and sexual slavery could be prosecuted and punished as crimes against humanity.

Director, Producer: Kumjana Novakova
Editors: Jelena Maksimovic
Sound: Vladimir Zivkovic
Design: Elena Dinovska Zarapciev
Production companies: Medea (North Macedonia), Pravo Ljudski (Bosnia and Herzegovina)
Sales: Pravo Ljudski (Bosnia and Herzegovina)
Venue: Sarajevo (Documentary Competition)
In Bosnian, English.
63 minutes

The Film Verdict at Sarajevo Film Festival 2023.

Cousins visited Sarajevo in 1994, when he was still in his twenties and was director of the Edinburgh International Film Festival. It was the height of the Siege of Sarajevo, when Serb forces surrounded, blockaded and assaulted the city for 1,425 days. Cousins visited the Obala Art Centar cinema, where films were screened for besieged citizens. The Sarajevo Film Festival grew out of this cultural hub, and Cousins was instrumental in rallying support internationally for its launch.

Sectarian violence is not new to Cousins, who grew up during The Troubles in Ireland, in a working-class family with a Catholic mother and Protestant father. “I was tenderised in Belfast,” he said. “The only place I felt safe and relaxed was in a cinema space, where I could be entranced by the magic carpet ride of the movie screen, and that is one of the reasons I fell in love with cinema.”

But this did not prepare him for ‘90s Sarajevo. “When I came here I felt like I’d been awakened. I saw the full spectrum of life, and felt it was the worst place I’d ever been. The tragedy, terror, aggression, and fascism. And yet within that, the wild creativity of the Obala Art Centar people. The complexity and amplitude of the experience has stayed with me today, and the way the people defied the Serb aggressors, saying ‘You will not snuff us out, we will live fully.’”

Cousins’s recent documentary The March on Rome (2022) screened in Sarajevo’s Dealing With the Past section, an annual side-bar of international work curated to facilitate dialogue, reconciliation and healing in the former Yugoslav region from its own painful history. The film employs his signature mix of archive, astutely rewatched for telling detail, and musing voiceover, in this instance to chart the rise of Benito Mussolini’s fascist regime in Italy, and the way in which footage was manipulated into propaganda that enhanced an illusion of his populist might.

“Fascism will always be defeated and lose in the end, but it always pops up somewhere else in a new form,” said Cousins of his urge to tackle the subject, during this time of a resurgent far right in Europe.

A prolific documentarian, Cousins has made numerous films about cities, including I Am Belfast (2015), a mythic, poetically associative take on Northern Ireland’s capital, personified as a 10,000-year-old woman whose voiceover takes us meandering through the streets. His idiosyncratic, enthusiastic meditations on the way in which cinema gives us eyes to see things anew have also underpinned a number of works on the history of film, most notably his fifteen-hour The Story of Film: An Odyssey (2011), and his fourteen-hour Women Make Film (2018), which foregrounds the work of 183 female directors sidelined from official history.

Bringing work from marginalised voices and perceived peripheries to more mainstream attention, and in turn, improving access to global culture in isolated places, has always been a major concern of Cousins. As well as his involvement in maintaining a cinematic bridge during Sarajevo’s Siege, he is well-known for the 2009 journey he undertook around the Scottish Highlands with Tilda Swinton, where they manually towed a 33.5-tonne portable cinema to show films to locals in out-of-the-way locations.

“When you come from a place like Belfast you are on an edge, and you feel like a second-class person; you’re a universe away from centres of power like London or New York,” he said. “But from the edge, we can be very good lookers. My favourite subject at school was physics, and I adored Copernicus, the famous Polish astronomer, who asked what if you aren’t the centre of the world, and there are many centres. What if creativity is not about self-expression, but looking outward to other parts of the world, to see what’s out there?”

The Film Verdict at Sarajevo Film Festival 2023.

In fact, Domonokos Erhardt’s heady short takes place primarily in the window reflection of such a bus – or at least it seems to. Made as the graduation film from the director’s master’s at Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design, the film bears the familiar hallmarks of a brief, contained student animation project but is inventively animated and its depiction of an instant of human connection is both relatable and oddly touching. The film premiered back at the Berlinale, where it got a special mention in the Generation 14plus section, and now it competes as part of the student competition in Sarajevo.

Alongside his work in animation, Erhardt is also a comic book artist and the visual style of From the Corner of My Eyes bears many resemblances to the kind of frames you might find in an indie graphic novel. Using bold blocks of light and shade, the aesthetic calls to mind lino or woodcuts, with pastel colour washes less interested in picking out detail than casting objects and people in their own unique, evocative hue. Even taken as static moments, the images have an other-worldly quality to them but the way that the film plays with light creates these almost expressionist sequences where movements seep from the shadows and people can be dragged into dreams. The glimpses of Budapest beyond the bus are atmospheric. Still, the action inside the bus is beautifully uncanny in the way the external darkness is impenetrable and the windows act as distorted mirrors.

The story that Erhardt uses these animated flourishes to tell is one that most people will be able to relate to. A guy gets onto a bus and as his gaze passes across the glass of the window he locks eyes – almost imperceptibly, for just an instant – with a woman sitting behind him via their reflections. That fleeting second of association blossoms in the man’s imagination, emerging from the glass in the window as what-might-have-beens fill the screen, before landing back with a thud in the bus, where the duo remains, sat on either side of the aisle. It’s a miniature tale, but you get caught up in its sweeping visuals.

Director, screenplay: Domonkos Erhardt
Cast, Music: Soma Nóvé
Producer: József Fülöp
Editing: Judit Czakó
Sound: Mátyás Tóth
Production: Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design (Hungary)
World sales: NFI World Sales
Venue: Sarajevo Film Festival (Competition Programme – Student Film)
No dialogue
6 minutes

She is sixteen and has come to Athens to visit her heavily pregnant sister. Nominally, she is there to help Alexandra (Katerina Zisoudi) in the final weeks and months before the baby is born, but at a transitional age, she also begins to take her first tentative steps into womanhood. Adapted from Giorgos Sibardis’s novel, Christina Ioakeimidi’s Medium treads some familiar pathways through the coming-of-age drama, but is enlivened by a captivating performance from Beveratou, a beguiling atmosphere, and the ambiguities of some of its more off-beat moments.

In the film’s opening moments, it feels as though its languorous pace is being dictated by that of the characters, who are suffering in the heat and happy to wallow, prone, in the shade of their apartment. In fact, the rhythms employed by Iaokeimidi’s adapted screenplay are similar to this anyway – moments are allowed to linger, characters communicate without words both to one another and the audience, and things are left to be discerned for ourselves through subtle cues rather than laborious extant explanation. It’s a tempo that amplifies the lethargy of the hot summer days but also allows for smooth shifts into Eleftheria’s burgeoning explorations of a life beyond his sister’s four walls and the drift into an intoxicating sort-of-relationship with their handsome downstairs neighbour, Angelos (Nikolakis Zeginoglou).

Despite their clear age gap, Angelos takes Eleftheria under his wing, and he drives her around the city on the back of his motorbike. Beveratou is captured in close-ups with the wind in her hair – a not unusual visual motif for this genre, but here one that feels very evocative given the stifling heat. Angelos is both a gateway into a new world of adulthood – and, potentially, sex and romance – but he is equally a release. In snatches of interactions and insinuations of exchanges the layers of tension within Eleftheria and Alexandra’s family become evident, both between the sisters but also back at home, in the village where the former lives with her father and his new family. They both clearly carry the weight of their absent mother, who was lost suddenly to cancer a few years previous and who has left them both with gaping holes that neither quite knows how to address.

This underlying pain is one of the reasons that Angelos introduces Eleftheria to his friend Anna (Martha Fritzila), the eponymous medium. And she acts as a strange beacon around which other characters seem to revolve, for Eleftheria she holds an ambiguous allure, one that presumably oscillates between being drawn to answers and afraid of them. She has a similar sense of controlled naiveté regarding Angelos who, from an early exchange would seem to potentially be gay, but with who she continues to become ever more deeply infatuated.

These contradictions and uncertainties are what make Eleftheria such a compelling character to spend time with. A girl on the cusp of womanhood is something that we are familiar with seeing portrayed in cinema, but it was supposedly her uniqueness that drew Ioakeimidi to make a film of this story in the first place. As such, it’s a challenging role for a young actress to undertake but one that Beveratou largely excels in. In much the same way that Ioakeimidi’s direction allows the film to morph between different registers with imperceptible elisions, so too does Beveratou’s performance allow her to inhabit a multifaceted character who can very naturally veer between hyper-vulnerability and assured wisdom. She can make poor decisions, or behave childishly, but equally seem to understand more than she lets on. In one sequence late in the film Eleftheria flees into the night to drink away her emotions – the less said about Beveratou’s drunk acting, the better – and comes across a group of people breakdancing in the street. As she sways towards them, the scene feels destined for a humiliating conclusion, but, in fact, she lands a few rudimentary moves and is embraced by the group. It feels like a microcosm for the way she is viewed generally, and the inner resolve and maturity required to navigate the death of her mother and her resulting familial isolation.

As with any story about a teenage summer full of roiling passions and unusual experiences, the narrative is always heading for the summer’s conclusion. It is to Ioakeimidi and Sibardis’s credit that when that time comes in Medium, it feels both incredibly poignant and fundamentally fulfilling. Whatever difficulties she has been through, or will face in the future, Eleftheria’s rite of passage has allowed her insight into worlds she didn’t know. While the film itself eschews the uneven drama of the character’s emotional rollercoaster, it retains an undeniably perceptive streak that offers precious beads of human understanding.

Director: Christina Ioakeimidi
Cast: Angeliki Beveratou, Nikos Zeginoglou, Katerina Zisoudi, Martha Fritzila
Screenplay: Christina Ioakeimidi, Giorgos Sibardis
Producers: Louizos Aslanidis, Yorgos Noussias
Production: Esko Productions (Greece), Red Carpet Films (Bulgaria)
Sales Agent: Wide Management
Venue: Sarajevo Film Festival (Competition Programme – Feature Film)
In Greek
100 minutes

Where their previous short concerned a weekend of affectionate sorority, their new film focuses on a single night in which a father is responsible for his young daughter for the first time. As in their previous work, the scenario is rife with currents of drama that ebb and flow beneath the surface, building to a supremely understated but quietly devastating denouement. Lost Children screens as part of the European Shorts programme in Sarajevo this week, having taken the fiction award at Go Shorts earlier in the year.

Shot in an intimate style that is familiar from their prior work, the film opens with Nathan (Nathan Le Graciet) arriving to collect his infant daughter Anouk (Anouk Berlier Cambourieu) from her mother (co-director, Lola Cambourieu). The exchanges between mother and father are slightly awkward and it revealed that this will be the first time Anouk spends the night with her dad. His plan is to drive her to a local hotel, but it becomes evident that he has no car, no money, or place to take her, so they go on a hazy nocturnal perambulation. Later, the film jumps forward a couple of years, to how their relationship has developed since that night.

Cambourieu and Berlier’s command of the tone and timbre of their film is exquisite managing to finely balance the borderline irresponsibility of Nathan’s actions with his apprehension about doing right by his daughter. The sequence in which he takes her to a local bar to pass the hours, then walks the streetlight-flooded paths with her in his arms is almost dreamlike. The later scenes, in which she is a few years older, and Nathan has a new baby with another woman, are perfectly weighted to bring out the nuance in the almost imperceptible estrangement that occurs in such a situation. It makes for a deeply sad but beautifully calibrated family portrait, one in which the tragedy plays out in miniature instalments and the complexities of parental bonds are laid bare.

Directors, screenplay, editing: Lola Cambourieu, Yann Berlier
Cast: Nathan Le Graciet, Anouk Berlier Cambourieu, Lola Cambourieu, Léa Le Gall
Producers: Ninon Chapuis, Thibault de Gantès, Lucas Le Postec
Sound: Hugo Rossi, Victor Praud
Music: Tourner ma page, Jenifer Romanza, N. Paganini
Production: L’Heure d’été, Réalviscéralisme Films (France)
Venue: Sarajevo Film Festival (European Shorts)
In French
29 minutes

The Permanent Picture spans two periods of time, with fifty years between. The post-war rural south of Spain is a funereal world thick with shadows in which death hangs close, crucifixes hang over beds, and the Catholic Church dictates rigid self-control in female behaviour. From there, we shift northward, into the modern, urban realm of an advertising agency, where billboards are the new effigies, and the search is on for the perfect face to convince electoral voters.

A teenage mother leaves from her small town in the dead of night. The circumstances are hazy, but her urge to flee is not hard to fathom, as this is a sombre, fear-driven place of whispered riddles and stern judgments, where strict conformity governs rules for demure comportment. Mortality haunts daily life, and there is little line drawn between the worlds of the living and the dead. Rumoured apparitions of the Virgin spook locals, illness is left in the hands of God, and the young are forbidden to laugh in portrait sittings in case the spontaneous eruption of a smile should ruin their looks. The disappearing mother leaves her baby behind, in a traumatic separation that comes back into focus years later. 

In contemporary times, Carmen (Maria Luengo) has resettled in the northern part of the country, where she works as an advertising agency casting director. She takes a scouting trip to the countryside, searching for that elusive find of a face that has a “normal” realness to it, but is not so authentic that dreams and desires cannot be projected onto it. She chances upon Antonia (Antonia Ortega), who is getting by as a street vendor of perfume. Past and present collapse onto one another, as memory, displacement and grief haunt the new bond that forms between them.

The cryptic, stylised nature of this latticework of symbolic incident and encounter deflects any deep emotional identification with the protagonists, in a film that keeps reminding us of its own — and all cinema’s — intrinsic, depthless artificiality. We are prompted, instead, to question and doubt that images can capture even a sliver of momentary truth, and ponder what comfort or communion can be gained from a technological process that traffics in ghostly illusion. Strange visual phenomena and a history of spectral keepsakes are referenced to add evocative layers to the notion of looking as a cord to ease the pain of fatal separation: the double-exposed spirit photographs that enabled relatives to be pictured with those who had died or disappeared in the war, as if they were all still present together; and the “phantom limb” trick the brain plays after an amputation when seeing a mirror reflection and registering the lost hand still to be there. A rich soundscape of off-screen sounds (the sea, a baby crying, clicking fingers) deftly retains the presence of what is not seen in our orbit, in a world in which even sun on one’s face offers no empirical certainty there will not be rain moments later.

Director, Writer: Laura Ferres
Producer: Adrià Monés Murlans
Editor: Aina Calleja
Cinematography: Agnès Piqué Corbera
Cast: María Luengo, Rosario Ortega, Saraida Llamas, Claudia Fimia, Mila Collado, Dolores Martínez
Music: Fernando Moresi Haberman, Sergio Bertran
Sound: Dani Fontrodona
Sound Design: Alejandro Castillo
Music: Fernando Moresi Haberman, Sergio Bertran
Art Direction: Marta Collell
Production companies: Fasten Films (Spain), Le Bureau (France)
Sales: Be For Films (Belgium)
Venue: Sarajevo International Film Festival (Kinoscope)
In Catalan, Spanish
94 minutes

As a woman from a working-class background, major kudos is due to Ramsay for breaking multiple glass (and class) ceilings to become an internationally feted auteur film-maker. She remains a rare figure in the boys club of directors, who typically come into this very macho, competitive environment armed with more financial and social capital. In a 2020 interview with the UK film industry body BAFTA, Ramsay cited “being short” and “having a Glaswegian accent” as career obstacles.

That said, Ramsay looks back on her childhood in a poor district of Glasgow as both advantage and disadvantage. It certainly provided rich creative inspiration for her hauntingly lyrical debut feature Ratcatcher (1999), a unique fusion of social realism, painterly visuals and bittersweet nostalgia. “You make the best of your environment,” she told Indiewire in 2000. “It shapes you, but even if it’s a tough environment it doesn’t kill your imagination.”

Fortunately for Ramsay, her low-income family was rich in other ways. Her parents were film lovers, introducing her to classic Hollywood melodramas, Sirk and Hitchcock, Lana Turner and Bette Davis. She credits early childhood viewings of The Wizard of Oz (1939) and Don’t Look Now (1973) as intensely affecting, life-changing experiences. In her teens, she discovered art-house titans like Fassbinder, Bergman and Tarkovsky, with Ukrainian-American director Maya Deren’s avant-garde short Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) and David Lynch’s mind-bending psycho-noir Blue Velvet (1985) each leaving a deep impression.

Ramsay came to directing through fine art, photography and cinematography, all of which clearly inform her work. She deserves special kudos for her exacting attention to formal detail, particularly editing and cinematography, music and sound design. Her scores in particular are always adventurous choices, from dipping in and out of the avant-rock mix-tape that insulates Samantha Morton’s blissfully detached heroine from her amoral actions in Morvern Callar (2002), to the throbbing drones and crackles that Radiohead guitarist Johnny Greenwood weaves into the densely layered audioscapes of We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011) and You Were Never Really Here (2017).

A series of feted DIY short films showcased Ramsay’s nascent talents, notably the Cannes prize-winners Small Deaths (1996) and Gasman (1997). Between long-gestating feature projects, she has sporadically returned to the shorter format, winning a BAFTA award for Swimmer (2012), a radiantly beautiful monochrome dreamscape layered with personal homages to classic British cinema, which was originally commissioned for the London Olympics but which lives on as a sublime stand-alone artwork.

Special kudos is due to Ramsay for maintaining her uncompromising vision, often casting non-professionals alongside big stars, and pushing for an experimental aesthethic even with relatively mainstream material. Sometimes this has meant sacrificing big paychecks to avoid diluting her high-art approach. Most infamously, she walked out of directing Natalie Portman in the revenge western Jane Got a Gun (2015) after creative differences with the producers. Her reputation took a hit, but she also dodged a bullet, as the finished film later became a resounding critical and commercial bomb.

“I’ve got a reputation for being difficult,” Ramsay told the Guardian in 2018, “and yet with my crew and my cast, I’m super-collaborative and we get on really well, and they like working with me. So to me that always feels like bullshit.” Making a compromised film is doing the audience a disservice, she argues, hence the need to stick to her guns. “If you do that when you’re a guy, you’re seen as artistic – ‘difficulty’ is seen as a sign of genius. But it’s not the same for women.”

Ramsay has a special flair for audaciously re-imagined literary adaptations. In Sarajevo she will host an open air gala screening of her most recent feature, You Were Never Really Here (2017), which stars Joaquin Phoenix as a severely traumatised hit-man trying to save a teenage girl from a powerful sex trafficking ring. By extensively reworking the Jonathan Ames source novel, elevating a fairly straight revenge thriller into a sense-swamping, psychologically intense film noir, Ramsay won universally positive reviews plus two major Cannes prizes.

She may not be prolific, but kudos to Ramsay for tirelessly sticking to her high creative standards with ever more ambitious projects. In recent years she been developing several features including a radical remix of Hermann Melville’s Moby-Dick set in space, an Amazon-backed adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s short story Stone Mattress, co-starring Julianne Moore and Sandra Oh, and a screen version of Ariana Harwicz’s “motherhood horror” novel Die, My Love, starring Jennifer Lawrence. Earlier this year she confirmed all three are still tentatively active.

Crucially, while Ramsay’s films are always visually striking and lightly experimental, her unorthodox aesthethic choices never come at the expense of character or emotion. A rare balance between dramatic authenticity and fine-art values is her signature style. “It’s going beyond the surface that excites me,” she told BAFTA in 2020. “I think people can sense when something is phoney. That’s what I find so powerful about film-making, when you can be transported without really knowing why. It appeals to the senses like music.”

The Film Verdict at Sarajevo Film Festival 2023

Reeder’s work is often likened to David Lynch and David Cronenberg, comparisons she embraces. But there is a deeper interrogation of patriarchal power going on in her films, which is both darkly funny and deadly serious. One of her key themes, she says, is “our obsession with youth and beauty among young women and our desire to literally tear them apart.”

Screening at Sarajevo Film Festival this week, Reeder’s latest visually ravishing psycho-thriller Perpetrator stars Kiah McKirnan as Jonny, an 18-year-old high-school misfit sent away to stay with her eccentric aunt Hildie, as played by iconic screen queen Alicia Silverstone. Against a creepy backdrop of masked stalkers, serial kidnappings and shape-shifting monsters, Jonny learns some sinister ancient secrets from Hildie that run deep in the family bloodline.

Film festivals seem unsure how to program Reeder’s mind-bending, genre-subverting work. Perpetrator has so far played in mainstream sections, midnight movie sidebars and more experimental niches. In Sarajevo it screens in the Kinoscope Surreal sub-section alongside other high-calibre art-house shockers including Brandon Cronenberg’s hellish holiday gore-fest Infinity Pool, Bajoli’s supernatural Afro-Belgian witch fable Omen, and Karoline Lyngbye’s reality-warping marriage breakdown melodrama Superposition.

“It’s in great company,” Reeder tells The Film Verdict. “Seeing my name and the list of those other films makes sense to me. I would rather stand out with films that maybe need a little extra explanation, a little extra context.”

Reeder conceived Perpetrator during Donald Trump’s presidency, a period when toxic masculinity was trickling down from the very apex of the U.S. government. This inevitably gave the film an extra edge of political urgency. “I was writing this in 2019 and 2020,” she nods. “I kept thinking, gosh, if that guy could just borrow some empathy, have some empathy for a day, things would just feel so much better.”

Indeed, empathy is framed in paranormal terms in Perpetrator, echoing the transformational body-horror tropes in vampire and werewolf movies. “I’ve always really liked the idea, both in real life and in my films, of being able to take that thing that someone else decides diminishes you and make that your superpower,” Reeder explains. “Because so often we internalise all of that harmful language. So you could just take that and reverse it, make that your superpower.”

Alicia Silverstone is an inspired casting choice for Perpetrator, her presence an audience-winking nod to her own breakthrough role in Amy Heckerling’s post-modern high-school classic Clueless (1995). Reeder says Silverstone relished the deliciously Gothic vamp-queen side of Hildie, even wearing some of her own clothes for the role.

“She was such a little trooper,” the director nods. “I told her I wanted to pattern Hildie after Catherine Deneuve’s character, Miriam Blaylock, in The Hunger and she immediately got it. That sent her down a Deneuve rabbit hole in general, which is never a bad thing. But I was also thinking of Vertigo and Marnie and these kind of cool Hitchcockian blondes, so we really used a lot of that. All the campiness of both Hitchcock and The Hunger, bringing that to her character was really fun.”

Reeder draws heavily on horror movie grammar in Perpetrator, and flirted with slasher conventions in her previous high-school thriller, the deliciously weird teenage murder musical Knives and Skin (2019). But she is not entirely comfortable with the H-word, always pushing at the edge of the genre, testing its parameters.

“I don’t know that I am necessarily a horror director,” she frowns. “But I think that just even being horror-adjacent, or using genre tropes in my storytelling, I get to lean way into the fantastical and the surreal. That’s a really hard thing to do any other form. And I’ve always liked to think about the psychologically dark corners.”

Unlike most 50-something observers of teen and twentysomething characters, Reeder is never sneering or condescending towards her young protagonists. Indeed, she exhibits huge empathy towards a gender-fluid, open-minded, idealistic generation who are frequently derided by media commentators. “They are just so unfuckwithable,” she says proudly.

Many of Reeder’s young female characters are queer, or women of colour, or both, but she never makes race or sexuality central to the story. In an era of anti-woke backlash and manufactured culture war, these choices feel like unavoidably political statements.

“Absolutely,” Reeder nods. “When I have an opportunity to present characters that I think have been systematically under-represented, not just in films, but in life and politics, then why not do it? I know my films are not for everybody, but they are for somebody. And, you know, if a young queer girl of colour feels seen, maybe even for the first time, that matters to that girl. And it matters to me. And there are plenty of films out there for everybody else who isn’t that girl, so I don’t want to replicate that.”

When quizzed about the growing trend of female directors working in horror, Reeder is fond of reminding us that women actually invented the genre. “The world’s most favourite monster, Frankenstein’s creature, was written by a teenage girl,” she says. “So I feel like we actually own it. Also we’re taught from a pretty young age how to not get attacked, we’re taught that we’re prey, we are taught fear from a very young age, or at least I was. Also from a young age, we have a pretty consistent and normal relationship with blood. I mean, at any time during the month, you could wake up and you’re like a one-person crime scene, you know?”

Indeed, Perpetrator is absolutely drenched in blood, from recurring nosebleeds to vast, gloopy, clumpy lakes of hemoglobin. The connection between bleeding and female bodies is heavily stressed, and soon assumes almost surreally excessive levels, like a tampon commercial directed by Dario Argento. “There’s probably lots of men who consider menstrual blood to be what they’ve seen in a commercial,” Reeder laughs. “They imagine it’s like this very thin kind of pale blue liquid, lovely little droplets of pale blue.”

An aspiring ballet dancer in her youth, Reeder first enjoyed success as a visual artist, but insists she always had film-making in her sights. Eventually, the art gallery world proved too sterile and placid and “not loud enough”, so she began making low-budget narrative shorts. “At that time, I had so many friends who are musicians, and so I was going to see bands all the time. And with my background, even as a ballet dancer, I really felt like I wanted that energy of the crowd, you know? Just to sit and the lights go down, and we’re all experiencing something together. That just felt like really, really powerful.”

Reeder’s shorts eventually blossomed into features with the indie comedy-drama Signature Move (2017), followed by her prize-winning breakthrough Knives and Skin (2019). It took decades, but she did it her way.

“I have built my own path, which actually feels pretty great,” Reeder says. “I think there’s the assumption that I got to where I am because I went to film school, and then I was a PA on on film sets, or something like that. But I’ve never been on anybody else’s film set but my own. I’m not saying that was the easiest way to do it. But, you know, I’m a Gemini. I’m stubborn.”

Reeder is currently working on two new feature projects: one is “a kind of female-led History of Violence” partly inspired by the real-life murder spree that inspired Badlands (1973) and Natural Born Killers (1994), the other an adaptation of Julianna Baggot’s short story Nest, an eerie family fable of suburban suicide and ghostly apparitions. In a corner of the film industry where you either make art or you make money, Reeder seems to have found a rare balance between both.

“Having both is really nice,” she grins. “I feel kind of at that place right now. I was happy making art for a long, long time, figuring out how to subsidise my life in a different way. But right now, it’s nice to have both of them. Having said that, I still err on the side of art.”

For all her growing success, Reeder remains a cult filmmaker at heart, with a very strong auteur style. This means critics and film fans generally either love or hate her work, with not much reaction in between. But she denies having a confrontational agenda, and seems genuinely disappointed that her negative reviews have so far been more lazy than malicious.

“Some of the takes are just like: I just don’t get it? What was she trying to do? There’s too much going on!” she sighs. “I wish I was hated by smarter people.”

The Film Verdict at Sarajevo Film Festival 2023.

Charlie Kaufman receives the Honorary Heart of Sarajevo at the 29th Sarajevo Film
Festival, saluting a career spent writing and directing films that defied convention, and
reclassified humor as a malignant form of sadness.

It’s tempting to say that, while there are a lot of talented screenwriters in the world, there is only one Charlie Kaufman. But that’s a lie, and it’s all Charlie Kaufman’s own fault.

In the famed writer/director’s screenplay for Adaptation, Kaufman invented for himself an
identical twin brother, Donald, who gives into all the formulaic, Hollywood screenwriting clichés that the rest of Kaufman’s work deliberately eschews. Yet somehow Kaufman’s films have found a large audience, not just critical acclaim. In a style that could be deemed “screwball,” could be deemed “surreality,” and should probably be called “Screw Reality,” his stories explode our preconceived notions of narrative structure and conventional logic. And yet they still satisfy his audience’s needs for emotional payoff and disarming whimsy.

There’s method in Kaufman’s madness, a deep understanding of all the rules he regularly
breaks. Kaufman’s films are challenging and cohesive treatises on modern existentialism, but
not — as they may sometimes appear at a glance — confessions of a dangerous mind. A sad
mind? Certainly. An insecure mind? Maybe. But dangerous? Probably not, unless you’re a
screenwriting professor whose whole curriculum is based on formula, and some kid in the back of your class keeps asking “But what about Synecdoche, New York?”

Charlie Kaufman got his start writing for National Lampoon in the early 1980s, but his
screenwriting career didn’t take off until a decade later, when he found himself contributing to
some of the weirdest shows on television. Chris Elliott’s legendarily off-kilter sitcom Get a Life
was a fitting home for Kaufman, as was the unfairly forgotten sketch comedy series The Edge,
where every episode began with the whole cast getting murdered. Alongside cult favorites like
The Dana Carvey Show and Ned and Stacey, Kaufman had an uncanny ability to attach himself
to doomed comedy shows, all of them too strange and, often, ahead of their time to find a
contemporary audience.

Yet Kaufman, to his credit, learned absolutely nothing about how to play to a crowd. His first
produced feature-length screenplay, Being John Malkovich, is defiantly esoteric. The story of a
failed puppeteer whose fruitless career forces him into a tedious day job, which unexpectedly
leads him into the brain of an esteemed character actor. The specifics are bizarre but really, any struggling artist trying to transform stifling humdrummity into pure inspiration can probably relate.

Kaufman’s storytelling gamble paid off. Directed by Spike Jonze, Being John Malkovich was an
award-winning critical darling and somehow also managed to make money. He became a
Hollywood rarity, a writer whose inability to adhere to Robert McKee-esque screenwriting
principles was a selling point, not a demerit. He would write Confessions of a Dangerous Mind,
based on the outlandish autobiography of TV producer and game show host Chuck Barris, who
claimed to have moonlighted as an assassin for the U.S. government when he wasn’t gonging
talentless nobodies or tricking newlyweds into talking dirty. And somehow — compared to the
rest of Kaufman’s work — that deeply deluded elegy comes across as practically prosaic.

Few screenplays could ever claim to be as nakedly confessional as Adaptation. Kaufman,
tasked with writing an adaptation of Susan Orlean’s unadaptable best-seller The Orchid Thief,
found himself doing what so many writers do: agonizing, procrastinating, getting stuck inside his own head. In what history will no doubt declare one of the all-time great examples of turning a negative into a positive, Kaufman delivered not a screenplay adaptation but a screenplay about Kaufman’s total failure to write a screenplay adaptation. With his real self quagmired in doubt, his fictional identical twin Donald tries desperately to follow a pattern laid out by mainstream, audience-pleasing studio hackery. The result is a script credited to both Kaufmans, and Donald remains one of the few fictional human beings ever nominated for an Oscar.

While Kaufman’s films run a weird gamut of genres and styles — face it, almost everything
about them is unconventional — there’s a unifying streak of loneliness and self-incrimination.
Some writers think everybody is a hero in their own stories, but Kaufman’s heroes aren’t so
certain. They fight nobly against an oppressive world that tries to destroy them, yet they
themselves are the engines of their own destruction. Poor Caden Cotard of Synecdoche, New
York spends his whole life producing the world’s most ambitious work of dramatic theater, a
perfect encapsulation of human existence in its high-concept mundane profundity. It will never be completed, he will never be fulfilled. The two lovers at the heart of Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind are also forever doomed to an endless cycle. Then again maybe they get off easy. They keep obliterating each other’s memory, but at least they keep discovering each other first.

Kaufman’s screenplays have been brought to life by MTV generation wunderkinds like Spike
Jonze and Michel Gondry, and for years it seemed as though perhaps only a handful of
filmmakers understood the secret to unlocking the potential of Kaufman’s depressing, anti-
escapist tales of contemporary fantasy. But from Synecdoche, New York onward, Kaufman has been behind the camera as well. His stop-motion Anomalisa and live-action I’m Thinking of Ending Things form the second and third parts of a trilogy of self-centered loneliness, where personal expression is both beautiful and isolating, women are comforting and terrifying, and a pathetic death is perhaps the only plausible release. (And even that isn’t reliable.)

You could label Kaufman’s films as “dark comedies,” but even that’s misguided. Most dark
comedies subscribe to the idea that within the tragedy of life, there can be found comedy.
Kaufman’s films all argue something altogether different, and much less pleasant: that existence of comedy in our lives is, itself, the greatest tragedy of all. Comedy exposes the illogical, the unfair, the embarrassing. Kaufman’s comedy is not the catharsis. Kaufman’s comedy is the pain.

Beautiful pain.

The Film Verdict at Sarajevo Film Festival 2023.