Dear Orchid

The diaries of the filmmaker’s sister provide the visual and theoretical inspiration for Dear Orchid.

Hana Selena Sokolovic’s short documentary uses the journal of her older sister, Selma Parisi to both explore the nature of fleeing war-torn Bosnia and to prompt a charming scrapbook aesthetic through which she then tells this family story. Selma and her other sister, Senka, let Sarajevo and travelled through Bosnia and Croatia during the siege in 1992 and Selma’s reflections in her diary give a rather unique perspective on an experience that will be very familiar to audiences at the Sarajevo Film Festival, where the film competes in the documentary competition this week having premiered earlier in the year at Rotterdam.

The diary is a mixture of elements, some which explicitly tackle their situation and what it means for a young girl to have been forced to leave her home and family. Other parts imply the difficulties of that flight while there is a recurring motif of invented songs that Selma has written out and dated. Selma herself narrates the film alongside her own daughter, Sara, who gives some of the entries a more authentic childlike quality despite the undeniably grown-up world she was facing.

This childlike perspective is fully embraced by Sokolovic who uses the visual elements of the original diaries to create a patchwork, almost video collage, style. In some instances the entire screen is covered by the texture of lined paper and both the words and some doodles from the margins appear – trees, flowers, shapes, hearts. They then bleed from the evident notebook sections into archival materials and newly shot footage – Selma’s hand drawn flowers suddenly popping up along a roadside shot by Hana, three ladies that have come to represent the sisters slide into frame in various locations.

Dear Orchid feels like a genuine attempt to represent the diary, in the same way that the diary is a genuine attempt to capture personal experience. This creative approach marries the personal and political in a way that gives the film a power that may not initially, on the surface, be obvious.

Director, screenplay, cinematography, editing: Hana Selena Sokolovic
Narrated by: Selma Parisi, Sara Parisi
Animation: Marija Despodova
Venue: Sarajevo Film Festival (Documentary Competition – Short Film)
In English, Bosnian
18 minutes

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