A solitary figure traverses a lonely mountain snowscape, silently communing with ruggedly beautiful nature, his only companion his beloved horse. The subject of Maya Novakovic’s At the Door of the House Who Will Come Knocking may notionally live on the fringes of 21st century Europe, in the hills of eastern Bosnia, but his spartan existence almost feels like a flashback to some ancient realm of folklore and magic. With his wild hair, unruly beard, and granite-carved face, he could have stepped out of a fairy tale. He is also plainly struggling with a heavy emotional burden, deep inner reserves of loss and grief which the film never explains, instead inviting viewers to find their own universal resonance in this painterly rumination on rustic isolation.
Working with similar stylistic and thematic material as her feted short Then Comes The Evening (2019), which won numerous festival awards, Novakovic brings her fine-art background to bear on the documentary format with her debut feature. The title borrows a line from French avant-garde poet Pierre Albert-Birot, and indeed this whole film plays like a kind of poem, impressionistic and lyrical, laced with visual rhymes and unvoiced subtext. Following its prize-winning world premiere at Sheffield Docfest in June, it is set to screen in competition at Sarajevo film festival this coming week. More live-action painting than straight documentary, this exquisitely crafted exercise in melancholic minimalism has an opaque, elusive tone pitched firmly at art-house viewers. Even so, it should generate plenty of critical praise, festival plaudits and specialist buyer interest.
The star of Novakovic’s film, 78-year-old Emin, first met the director at a photography exhibition 20 years ago, bonding initially over a mutual love of horses. She was drawn to Emin’s striking appearance and tragic back story: after losing his hairdresser brother in a tragic accident more than 40 years ago, he has refused to cut his hair or beard since, occasionally just hacking out clumps with his bare hands. None of this information is covered in the film, which presents Emin’s hermit-like existence almost entirely devoid of context, with minimal dialogue and maximum silence.
Multi-tasking as her own cinematographer and editor, Novakovic’s keen aesthetic sense is evident in her command of arresting, elegantly composed images: Emin’s face in flickering candlelight, sweeping panoramas of snow-cloaked woodland, radiant close-ups of flames consuming timber, smoke dancing through beams on sunlight, a horse silhouetted against a stark tree, and more. The director cites specific works by Van Gogh, Rembrandt, Caravaggio and Serbian landscape painter Sava Šumanovic as influences. The ravishing symbolic vistas of art-house masters like Tarkovsky, Tarr and Paranjanov are clearly part of her cultural DNA too.
At the Door of the House Who Will Come Knocking marks the changing of seasons with some clever stylistic flourishes: an icy river jump-cuts to a gushing stream, for example, or a snowy white landscape half-obscured by a brightly hued tapestry suddenly switches to verdant green meadow, with the same tapestry filling the same patch of screen. But the director subverts temporal expectations here, resisting the convention of using seasonal shifts as a structural device. Once the viewpoint reverts to Emin, the washed-out wintry palette returns, as if he is locked in some permanent state of emotional deep-freeze. Novakovic claims her intention was to create a “psychological landscape” more than a real one.
How much what we see on screen is pure reportage and how much a staged art-work is a common question for observational documentaries, but especially so here, when Novakovic introduces elements that seem to stray into semi-fictional terrain. In two scenes, Emin’s attempts to engage passing neighbours in deeper social interaction are politely rebuffed, but these brief exchanges feel slightly too scripted, with everyone pointedly ignoring the camera. Emin also wistfully contemplates a sepia-tinted, cobwebbed wedding photo that looks like it was taken a century ago, a dramatically charged scenario whose significance remains wilfully elusive. “My soul burns,” he sighs at one point. “Nobody understands my pain.”
In later scenes, an unnamed boy mysteriously appears from nowhere. He could be interpreted as a dream, a ghostly visitation, or even Emin’s childhood memories made flesh. Once again, Novakovic leaves the viewers to draw their own conclusions. These flickering hints of mysticism may push the rules of documentary to breaking point, but they mostly have a potent, eerie power. Likewise the grainy, mournful, sparingly deployed score by Luka Barajevic, which adds a hint of folk-horror without tilting the delicately balanced tone of this hauntingly beautiful midwinter night’s dream of a film.
Director, cinematography: Maja Novakovic
Screenplay: Maja Novakovic, Jonathan Hourigan
Editing: Maja Novakovic, Nebojša Petrovic
Sound, music: Luka Barajevic
Producers: Maja Novakovic, Skye Fitzgerald
Production companies: Kinorasad (Serbia), Seafarer Films (Belgium)
Venue: Sarajevo Film Festival (Documentary Competition)
World sales: Lightdox
In Bosnian
84 minutes
