How I fell in love with Eva Ras

Seventy-year-old Sena lives in the projection booth of a movie theatre in Sarajevo. Everything she does, aside from the everyday domestic necessities and a few visits including those of a certain Sasha, a charming young man who is broke, no doubt, and Ilija, who is a little older (male characters, of course, with flagrant though muffled novelistic resonances) is watching films from the Yugoslav cinema repertoire. The excerpts offered to us on screen all feature actresses like Eva Rus, mentioned in the title, though she is not the only one tracing connections between all of these works. We understand quickly enough that all of these citations are put together as if to tell, bit by bit, Sena’s imagined biography, and, more generally, a whole country’s life too: its expectations, its fears, pain, and struggles. Obviously this is where André Gil Mata’s ambition lies: in this passage from the inside, in a confined place, a condition of projection, to the open space set in motion through landscapes and the film’s action, a passage from tenuous dream-work to the transformed fruits of its imaginings. But it is especially the utopia of extremely connected vessels, between this thin inside and this fictional outside, that the film tries to give life to and, without a doubt, in one of its most compelling scenes in which bed sheets are stretched out to dry inside the booth, lets an echo, splendid and immaculate, resonate onto the theatre’s white screen. (JPR)