Is it possible to represent war with the tools of cinema? This question raises a thousand others, just like war itself wears a thousand masks. The film focuses on the 1990s wars in former Yugoslavia: a European war, an anachronistic war with mass graves and concentration camps contrasting with the high tech weaponry of modern conflicts, and above all a war that received a great deal of media attention, with unbearable images becoming commonplace as soon as they were broadcast on TV screens.
Yet another hackneyed analysis, you might think. Certainly not. Because in order to restore the faded power of images and personal accounts, and to remind everyone of their responsibility in a world where evil isn’t only wrought by war criminals, Selma Doborac, in her first full-length feature film, has set out to question, with extreme rigour, all the possible ways to make a film about war. Mass grave images are replaced by less spectacular video footage filmed by fighters themselves, or by 16mm shots of abandoned houses reclaimed by nature, that belong to the present as well as to the past.By breaking down the making of war images through a series of questions endlessly leading on to new ones, in the form of invasive subtitles or voice-overs sounding like news reports, the narrator also takes to pieces the mechanisms of perception, comprehension, memorialisation, and even simply communication itself. In doing so, the very language of cinema is called into question and the film becomes a unique experience, at once theoretical and autobiographical. (CG)