Birgitte Stærmose’s journey to make Afterwar started with her short film Out of Love (2010), featuring a group of street kids in post-war Kosovo’s Pristina, trying to make do by selling cigarettes, peanuts, or even their bodies to feed themselves and the families.
Her new docu-narrative Afterwar follows up on the stories of four of the amateur actors in her first film. Through them, she offers an intimate portrayal of individuals transitioning from childhood to adulthood, grappling with ongoing challenges. The Kosovo war is one of the deadly chapters in post-1945 European history, one whose aftermath is less seen and discussed than other conflicts.
The film starts by showing the documentary footage of destruction and displacement that the war left behind, not just on the country’s infrastructure but also on human beings. The four leads are first introduced as children. From a young age, their situation forces them to become adults, responsible for working for a living to feed themselves and their families. One sells cigarettes after school and does not tell his mother; one sells peanuts after his father was paralysed and his mother is in pain from cleaning rich people’s houses; one sees her mother working every day; and the last is a sex worker in fancy hotels or around the corner.
As a teenager, one of the protagonists declares he is afraid that human traffickers will kidnap him and steal his organs, to sell them to rich people. But he accepts reality and his dreams are reasonable. He wants nothing more than to have enough money to buy food, a house, a phone card — and maybe a pool if there is any money left over.
A conventional post-war narrative of trauma in countries plagued with violent conflict is not to be expected. Stærmose’s script surpasses that. “War settles in people like the plague. Despair and crime are a few symptoms,” one of the characters says sharply. Yes, her protagonists are traumatized. Maybe they do not know it in the Western-centered psychological sense, but they are easy prey to feelings of shame, depression, emotional coldness, and feeling unseen.
So although the characters have warm homes and are well nourished compared to their childhood, they still feel alienated from their loved ones, or feel an obligation to do more and more for them.
Stærmose uses the Eastern European aesthetics as a background to her storytelling: 1990s Mercedes Benzes (a very popular Balkan sign of wealth), tall Socialist architecture, dusty hotels, and small, cozy living rooms. Comparing the city where protagonists grew up with their current homes, not much change can be noticed. The only things new are the high-rise buildings of companies and the posh flats to which the majority of the population has no access, unless they are workmen, maids, or servants.
Stærmose does not criticize the current political situation, knowing that it is part of the destruction that the war created, but highlights the forms this destruction takes. Its victims work at low-paying jobs, pushed further down into poverty, reproducing the same structure of inequality.
The true strength of Afterwar is its blend of documentary and fictional elements in touching, hard-hitting monologues and unfiltered realism. By magnifying the pain of the protagonists, it lets the viewer’s imagination do the rest. It’s clear there is a high probability that they will be stuck in an endless struggle all their lives. When one of them tried to flee to Germany, he was sent to a refugee camp in Hamburg, a city he would have loved to explore. But after a year he was deported back to Kosovo.
Amid the cloudy, gray, and harsh streets of Kosovo, the protagonists are momentarily in charge of their narrative, and despite the cloud of despair from their past, some decide to take charge of their story by turning to religion, immigrating, rapping, vowing not to be like their parents. With this, Stærmose opens a small door for hope.
Director, screenwriter: Birgitte Stærmose
Cast: Gëzim Kelmendi, Xhevahire Abdullahu, Shpresim Azemi, Besnik Hyseni, Luan Jaha
Producers: Lise Lense-Møller
Cinematography: Marek Septimus Wieser, Troels N’Koya-Jensen
Editing: Stefan Sundlöf, Anne Østerud
Music: Erik K Skodvin
Sound: Kristian Selin Eidnes Andersen
Production companies: Magic Hour Films
Co-Producers: Visar Arifaj, Fredrik Lange, Mark Lwoff, Misha Jaari
Venue: Berlin Film Festival (Panorama)
In Albanian
85 minutes
