Cinema that grapples with genocide typically seeks to bear witness to the horror, solidifying its remembrance in collective history through testimony that records the names, places, dates and crimes, as well as giving validating voice to the survivors. With De Facto, experimental filmmaker Selma Doborac, who was born in Bosnia and lives and works in Vienna, takes a very different approach.
She returns to the question of how to represent the atrocities of war, a concern she previously examined through imagery of uninhabited, damaged buildings in the former Yugoslavia in her debut essay film Those Shocking Shaking Days (2016). She has stripped back contextualising information from the testimonies of war crimes perpetrators, and any reference to their archival sources, to consider the essence (if one can be determined) of this human will to commit atrocities, and to consider how acts which cross the bounds of what can be comprehended can be constituted, consumed or resisted through language.
What results is a radical act of courage, in both De Facto’s formal audacity and its existential commitment to going to the darkest of places psychologically. Utterly chilling, intelligently conceived, and cognitively, emotionally and ethically challenging, this hybrid work is in the Documentary Competition programme at the Sarajevo Film Festival, after winning the Caligari Film Prize at Berlin, where it screened in the Forum section earlier this year. Festivals with slots at the daring/uncompromising end of the documentary spectrum should pay attention.
The set-up seems simple enough: seated at a polished, reflective table (designed by artist Heimo Zobernig) in a Neoclassical gazebo with lush greenery behind them, two smartly dressed actors (Christoph Bach and Cornelius Obonya) alternate, reciting fragments of testimony with coolly detached matter-of-factness about what they did and saw in the war. Which war they are referring to is not easy to discern. Because they are speaking in German about extreme horrors in camps, the trial of Nazi war criminals initially springs to mind. Only later do details, such as weekend war tourists positioned in the surrounding hills, orient us, though still indefinitely, to the Bosnian War and the systematic methods of ethnic cleansing used in it to “morally annihilate” targets through rape and torture.
The lack of information to safely categorise and contain these descriptions (which lean more toward self-exonerating excuses of motivation, than to guilt-ridden confession) hits us with the shock that this could be happening anywhere, at any time; that these are universal inhumanities. All the while, the wind shakes the leaves in the greenery behind the men, as the static space in the frame is dynamised by a meticulous, inspired soundtrack.
An impressively broad range of sociological and philosophical terrain is covered by Doborac in the texts she has brought into focus: the phenomenon of worker servility and following orders with a belief in abject work that “just had to be done”; baseless behaviour as contagion, and relativity in times of war; the denialism of perpetrators who say they suffered more than their victims in carrying out these crimes; the systematic dehumanisation of both soldiers and those they persecuted; how to explain what moved some to a licentiousness and sexual sadism that even went against efficiency, crossing the line into a boundless, radical departure from what is normally understood as human, where concepts of freedom and evil warp and converge.
The stories and explanations through which these themes are explored are deeply distressing, and, as they pile up, exhausting, and it is at this point that terrorizing through language itself, its dissembling potential and inadequacy, is more explicitly and self-reflexively considered. At some point, everybody attending and reporting on the war crimes trial got fed up hearing about it all, we hear — except for the judges, who never got tired of asking. Why we want these descriptions, and what we want them to do for us, is as essential to reflect on as why others silence them, the film suggests.
Doborac refuses to placate any urge we may have for gratification through re-enactment as sensationalised entertainment. What she offers, instead, is a sliver of hope. An inmate reciting poetry to fight against her imprisonment in an unspeakable non-place is recalled as an almost impossible image of strength, as she summoned imaginary dialogue to reconstitute her own world. A poetic protest that cinema can and must also access.
Director, screenwriter, producer, editing, production design: Selma Doborac
Cast: Christoph Bach, Cornelius Obonya
Cinematography: Klemens Hufnagl
Music: Didi Kern, Philipp Quehenberger
Sound: Claus Benischke-Lang
Sales: sixpackfilm (Austria)
Venue: Sarajevo Film Festival (Competition Programme – Documentary)
In German
130 minutes
