Degraded VHS and looping, muddled audio combine to astonishing effect in Norika Sefa’s Like a Sick Yellow.
In its opening moments, as a stilted, disembodied voice intones that it has “remembered her way of seeing,” the film begins laying out its inscrutable audiovisual collage. Centred on a house in a Kosovan suburb, the film compiles grainy home video footage depicting a single home, set against looping sound cues. We see short clips of family gatherings alongside snatches of narration and dialogue and a discordant soundtrack. Each element seems to defy meaning in isolation, but they generate a cumulative force, a symphony evoking the shock of imminent war.
The almost mechanical timbre to the narrator’s glitchy observations initially suggest they are distant descendants, mining the memories of Nora, but the scenes elide time and people appear and depart. It is not that there are no individual characters who emerge, or no recognisable narrative vignettes, but they become subsumed in Like a Sick Yellow’s temporal möbius strip of damaged magnetic video tape. The recurring images evoke the recurrence of violence, the unstable nature of time seems tied to the crashing together of past and present in the face of war. Where collective trauma can explode society, here it has evidently exploded structure and form.
As the individuals emerge from and then disappear back into the collective, so too we are reminded of how the discrete victims of conflict can vanish in the sheer scale of the horror. In Sefa’s patchwork of repetitions, moments of familial assembly become preludes to a country torn asunder. Like a Sick Yellow conjures a past, present and future that have all become infected by the long fingers of trauma.
Director, screenplay: Norika Sefa Producer: Mentor Shala Editing: Stefan Stabenow Sound design: Labinot Sponca Music: Nuno Pinto World sales: Square Eyes Venue: Sarajevo Film Festival (Competition Programme – Documentary Film) In Albanian 23 minutes
