You can’t break me
At the risk of sounding a little insensitive, Marta Popivoda’s Landscapes of Resistance is the most engaging film I caught at the Rotterdam Film Festival. It is engaging because of the visual style that Marta opts; the film is abstract and thematically, it reminded me of the great Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami’s 24 Frames. Like the latter, Marta’s documentary feature (she calls it a “Partisan” film) has the visuals talking, although we do have a voiceover and a protagonist. As the title indicates, the film is about resistance and the unbroken spirit exhibited by Sonja, who was among the first female partisans in Serbia who helped lead the resistance in Auschwitz (doesn’t the name itself send shudders?). At one point, Sonja and Marta break down while recollecting memories that are very much ingrained in their way of life. “Crying could be a great reason to make a political film,” says Marta. And that, one suspects, is why she made Landscapes of Resistance; a single person’s account of having witnessed and survived the worst of human barbarity.
Also Read: Get 'First Day First Show', our weekly newsletter from the world of cinema, in your inbox. You can subscribe for free here
Yes, the subject material is one thing but how Marta structures to tell the story makes it a fascinating watching experience, even at the comforts of home. It is almost like an audiobook with a beautiful set of images that lingers on, even after the audio fades out. The visuals of landscapes are disoriented — perhaps that was the whole point. So, when Sonja talks about her early days in Belgrade; the time she borrowed literature from a friend and was expelled from school for dating a Communist youth, and when she faked her birth certificate to run away to Valjevo to get married to him, we get to see a range of long and wide shots of walls, thatched rooftops, shadow of a tree on a river, the gap between two windows and so on. Even the voiceover is superimposed on the sounds of Nature, like grasshoppers hissing, cats purring and bees buzzing. The idea, one suspects, was to bring a sense of calmness to a film that is about trauma.
A still from ‘Landscapes of Resistance’ | Photo Credit: IFFR Press
As Sonja rummages through memories of the past, Marta revisits a dark chapter of history to picture together the fascism of yesterday and the growing fascism and racism in today’s Berlin. In one way, you could say that Landscapes of Resistance is Marta’s ‘sorry’ film — in fact, there is a moment when Sonja says she holds no grudge against the Germans, but the Nazis — apart from it being a feminist’s voice.
Landscapes of Resistance is a disturbing film. It is a disturbing film for what it leaves to our imagination, in the absence of visuals. Take the time when Sonja, a self-confessed Communist, was dressed up like a peasant with a bomb suit and a revolver, to carry out an attack against a train full of Serbs. It could have been a great scene in another film, but here, you get to play out the detail in your head and that in itself is chilling.
There is a particularly disturbing memory that Sonja recounts. This was when she was arrested, jailed and tortured at a camp in Banjica and was later sent to Auschwitz, where, she says, she had no idea why people were talking about chambers of gas. When the film goes into the slightly disturbing zone, we begin to wonder if the visuals we are seeing are the actual locations where Marta and her team went and shot. In Germany, apparently there are monuments dedicated to the survivors of the concentration camp. We are not sure if Sonja got one, but we are reasonably confident that Landscapes of Resistance is Marta’s way of saying “thank you” for yesterday and for today.
Whatever that is left to our imagination in Landscapes of Resistance, is what the next film is all about.
Memories of mayhem
In Jasmila Zbanic’s powerfully-acted Bosnian film, Quo Vadis, Aida?, the personal becomes the larger politics, where the horrors of the Srebrenica massacre of 1995 that killed over 8,000 Bosniak Muslim men and boys, unfold in the eyes of Aida (Jasna Duricic in a marvellous performance), a mother of two adult boys and a translator for the United Nations (UN) in Srebrenica — which had been declared a “safe zone” for civilians by the UN, and the fort now managed by a handful of Dutch soldiers from the Army of Republica Srpska.
The film opens with a rather unusual tracking shot of Aida having a moment with her family on what appears to be a perfectly normal day. It is a deeply-moving shot, if you hark back to this quiet moment when the film ends. The opening scene gets cut, bursting the myth, the reality. In the present, we see Aida, a school teacher, trading words with the UN for the safety and security of 30,000 citizens, as the Army of Srpska marches close to taking down the entire town.
Aida is caught at the crossroads of protecting her family and facing the music for being an insider, thanks to the ID card that hangs around her neck, like a cursed necklace. You do understand what her privilege could do initially, when she tries to induct her family into the safe zone, unintentionally killing the hope of a thousand faces as a gatekeeper. But the privilege and education gets you nowhere in a warzone, especially when you find your own student in the opposite camp, politely checking on you with weapons slung on his shoulder.
A still from ‘Quo Vadis, Aida?’ | Photo Credit: IFFR Press
Unlike the highly-stylised war films of the West, Zbanic crafts a sturdy drama where the tension leading up the eventual showdown is more harrowing — whether it is the scene where the commander of the Srpska enters into the safe zone with his army of men, playfully throwing loaves of bread, as if they were feeding leftover breadcrumbs to fishes; the one where a woman is sexually harassed, or when a boy is admonished by the Dutch for innocently pointing at an escaping civilian, also a boy dressed like a girl, who is swiftly poached by the Srpska.
Apart from the chilling turn of events that are now buried in memory, Zbanic seems more interested in giving the audience a sense of chaos that pervaded in Srebrenica between 1992-95. Maybe that is why even the extras look exactly like civilians. Maybe that is why their eyes carry a glint of hopelessness. One of my favourite scenes has Aida sharing a cigarette with a fellow translator, who starts kissing his colleague at one point. Though a “safe zone”, there is no sense of privacy. Aida looks at them and bursts out laughing, which took me by surprise. But Zbanic cuts the scene to the past, where Aida takes part in a hairstyle competition in the years preceding the war. In that moment of chaos and uncertainty, Zbanic shows us the possibility of what could have happened to Aida and the people of Srebrenica, if not for the war.
Zbanic is extremely sensitive and cautious in terms of how she wants Quo Vadis, Aida? to be seen and perceived. Which is why she turns the camera away — perhaps to respect the lives that were killed — when she films the genocide. She is naturally angry, given that Quo Vadis, Aida? is based on her own experience of growing up in Srebrenica during the war. But her anger reflects in making a powerful political statement through art and not the other way round.
Take the film’s closing shot and you will know what I mean. Years, maybe decades, after the war, Aida returns to her hometown as a school teacher. She finds out her apartment. She collects every last detail that could preserve her memory. She comes to know that one of her students is the son of the perpetrator. She doesn’t care. She does her job. She teaches them something profound for their skit. It has something to do with the children opening their eyes. The camera zooms in and Aida looks on. She, like Zbanic, is looking at the men.
Watch this space for more on IFFR.