VERDICT: Farah Hasanbegovic uses a beautifully simple hand-drawn animation style to bring to life this meditation on physical limitations and finding acceptance in our own bodies.
An image of a chest x-ray opens Farah Hasanbegovic’s Ribs, a brief but moving examination of the interplay between emotions and physical form. The illuminated display provides a visual backdrop for the filmmaker’s narration explaining that she has a condition that saw her thorax twisted due to misaligned muscle and skeletal development. Playing in the documentary competition at the Sarajevo Film Festival, the film continues in this confessional mode as Hasanbegovic ruminates on feelings of guilt and freedom and how these emanate from – and are contradicted by – her body. She accompanies these musings with delicate and expressive line-drawn animation.
The drawings in question take the form of a variety of birds, primarily in outline: crows, pigeons, doves, an origami crane. Long before the voiceover articulates how the birds are potential representations of emancipation, the implications of their grace and movement in comparison to the narrator’s spinal difficulties are readily apparent. However, the way that the birds are drawn, in a ranging freehand that sometimes colours them in with wayward scribbles, complicates this. While the beings that the images represent may be elegant and at liberty, the images convey both the release of flight and the rooted, trapped earthliness of corporeal form.
Hasanbegovic takes this element a step further with the paper crane. Telling a story about her father promising to make her a thousand such creations and fastidiously keeping those even with imperfections, she seems to discover herself. The meticulously folded miniatures with bent appendages come to even more closely embody the filmmaker’s own experience and the knots and kinks in their wings and beaks evoke the imagined knots and kinks she feels in her stomach as a result of her material form. Across the course of the film, the analogy between the delicately drawn birds and the fragility of any human body – let alone one with its own internal issues – is delivered with a surprising punch. When the final shot, returning to the opening x-ray, suggests a hopeful revelation, the physical effect is palpable.
Director, screenplay, editing, cinematography, sound: Farah Hasanbegovic
Producers: Victor Candeias Attila Kekesi
Production company: Doc Nomads (Belgium)
Venue: Sarajevo Film Festival (Competition – Documentary Film)
In Bosnian
8 mins
