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To return to the Balkans

The Unforgiven / Shapeshifters
Regissør: Lars Feldballe-Petersen/Sophie Vukovic
(Finland og Danmark/Sverige)

Two documentaries portray people who for various reasons had to leave the former Yugoslavia. For equally different reasons, they also return.




(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)

"My name is Esad Landzo. I've been a prison guard in the Celebici prison camp [in Bosnia and Herzegovina]. I really did terrible things. ”That's how the documentary begins The Unforgiven, a film about the difficulties and possibilities of healing from a dark past. Landzo himself articulates the core question: "Would I be able to forgive someone like me?" He has committed heinous crimes, including torture and murder. Does he deserve a normal life? How can he possibly get this? And what about his victims?

The Unforgiven had a world premiere during CPH: DOX in March, and immediately brings the viewer up to date with the story: the Bosnia war started in 1992 and lasted for three years. After the war, 161 persons were indicted by the International Criminal Court of the former Yugoslavia. One of them was Landzo. We see him being sentenced in The Hague, and the prison gate closing behind him. Archive footage of prison guards and prisoners in the Finnish prison, including a young Landzo, rounds off the opening sequence.

Director Lars Feldballe-Petersen first met Lando during the recording of the documentary Crossing the Line (2006), which is the source of the early recordings we see The Unforgiven. Landzo was one of four main characters the filmmaker followed as he explored the theme he is most passionate about: What makes a person "cross the line" and commit outrageous acts?

Before and after the war. The Unforgiven makes the strongest impression when Landzo, still in prison, considers a picture of himself as a young boy. "I don't know what to say," he says, holding back tears that seem real. "I just can't believe this boy is the same person as the monster I became later. Every child is innocent, but when I look back on the past, I just can't believe it, I don't see anything in those eyes of the devilishness I showed in the war. ”Moments like these made an impression on Feldballe-Petersen. “I found that Esad, more than anyone else I know, has the courage and the ability to reflect to answer these questions. He had something about him that convinced me that the basic theme I had been working on for so long had to be further developed. ”Feldballe-Petersen decided to continue filming Landzo as he escaped from prison.

Cut to 2006, and Landzo is released (ahead of time, due to good behavior). The journey back to a lifetime, or at least an attempt at some kind of everyday life, begins. But an old word of wisdom turns out to be true: Freedom does not only depend on external conditions. We meet Landzo again in 2010 in Helsinki, where he struggles to find work and a fresh start in life. "All I have is my past, and it buryes me every moment now."

War leaves scars, and so can migration.

Return to the Balkans. Will Landzo ever be able to regain some kind of normalcy? Will the weight of his past ever lighten? It seems hopeless. "His father beat him, the court in The Hague denies him the right to return to his home country of Bosnia, and since he joined the war as a very young man, he has no education," Feldballe-Petersen says. But Landzo is struggling, perhaps in desperation, to believe that an attempt at reconciliation with the past, and that standing face to face with the people he harmed, may be the key.

That is why the war criminal from the Balkan war travels back to Bosnia to meet the victims and their families: a mix of those who are willing to talk to, or scream and howl at him, and those who understandably want nothing to do with him . We get to know the former prisoners of war and their families and what they have to contend with, and experience that abuse, torture and pain continue to haunt them.

The Unforgiven ends quietly, without any major disclosure or complete solution. Has Landzo found reconciliation? Is he closer to freedom? Are the victims especially much freer? Maybe it was naive to think that we would get all the answers nicely changed on a platter. And may be just the point: War destroys. The clamor for normalcy, peace, healing or forgiveness – even the desire for it – is so personal and there is no timeframe.

The strength of The Unforgiven is the light it throws at the process, not at the end. This is how the film becomes strongest when it rests in the quiet moments. Between husband and wife, mother and child, father and son, victim and perpetrator; the man and himself.

The hunt for a home. The conflict in former Yugoslavia is also the subject of another film at this year's CPH: DOX, namely Sophie Vukovics Shapeshifters. Here, too, the country has been abandoned, as Vukovic's family emigrates to Australia when Sophie is only 4 years old. As an adult, she embarks on a new journey, from Australia, via China, to Sweden. What's at home? Where is home? And who are we when we leave the country we were born in so early? Is it possible to revise the concept of "self" regardless of nationality and cultural identity?

These are open questions for Vukovic. She makes her own exploration into a cinematic essay; a lyrical meditation on belonging and migration, and who we are when we think beyond boundaries – both those we cross and those we build. Can we exist in the spaces between these boundaries?

There is a youthful spirit in her film, which must be attributed to something more than the simple fact that the filmmaker was born after the turn of the millennium. The place she puts her story in is newly discovered. War criminal Esad Landzo makes sense of his grim past through the hope of creating a life in the present. Vukovic, in turn, makes sense for his own present by finding new ways of viewing it, or adapting it, or defining it, so that the future can be built on this understanding, this fresh vision, unbound by the past, or in at least not controlled by it.

Shapeshifters is a hybrid documentary that elegantly blends non-fiction and narrative elements, home-made films and intimate conversations, and featuring a driving (and yet contemplative) voice-over by the director himself. The perspective is skillfully extended from the personal to the collective by using young actors as global citizens – the global "she" of her youth – who all perform well in their roles.

Existential exploration. But there is no road map to follow. There are impressions and moments and experiences. And there are pictures, many poetic pictures, like blue skies and leafy bits of glass. And forests, wintery trees with bare branches – the rootlessness of the theme sounds all the way ("Who do you become if you don't have a fixed point to start from?") It's water that showers in a stream ("I made a fantasy of a homeland that would embrace me ") and snakes in the grass (" but perhaps land was never created to embrace / but rather to divide and cut off / so I think: I won't even try ".) Belonging was the original title of the movie and fits well, but you can almost hear when it is replaced with Shapeshifters, Vukovic declares, over a picture of a dark field: "I adapt, as usual. It's my talent, to live in several worlds at the same time. "

The Unforgiven is strongest when resting in the quiet hours.

Vukovic's conversations with his parents help to balance the ethereal and existential wanderings of the film. This is where the practicality seeps in. Why did we leave Yugoslavia, Vukovic asks his father. For him it was simple: to have a better life. "Do you know how many people die in desperation every day in Croatia?" he asks. His father's love goes deep, his care for her happiness emanates from the canvas, and he accepts it when she returns to Bosnia to find out more about her past. He has no interest in going back, he talks about the story and tells about emotional scars, but realizes that things can be different for the daughters. "Have a good time in Bosnia," he resigns.

No easy ending. Like The Unforgiven neither has Shapeshifters some fancy ending. War leaves scars, and so can migration. But there is hope to be found in Vukovic's new thinking. She changes the rules, definitions, and is open to new ways of being and identifying. "Refuse to look for a home if home means land, because then the threshold for belonging is too high," Vukovic declares over the final pictures in the film showing a flock of friends in need, against a gold forest as a backdrop. “The spaces are not empty, they are not absent. It's just that what's in the spaces, we don't have language yet. "

Shapeshifters is part of the language of the new global bourgeoisie.

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