Macedonian director Kumjana Novakova returns to the documentary competition at Sarajevo Film Festival with world premiere Silence of Reason, another unflinching work bearing witness to atrocities committed in the Bosnian War of the ‘90s.
Novakova’s work recognises that history is a seamless part of the lived present, and when it is heavy with unprocessed pain, it has a way of haunting the buildings and images that remain as reminders of the horror. She confronted the collective trauma that subsists in the landscape and community of Srebrenica, a town now synonymous with the 1995 genocide of Bosniak Muslims by Serb forces that became a defining event of twentieth-century inhumanity in Europe, in her feature documentary debut Disturbed Earth (2021), co-directed with Guillermo Carreras-Candi. Poetry and research rigour characterised that experimental work, which blended archive material with current-day footage of survivors. Silence of Reason is her first sole-directed feature. In it Novakova, again with great sensitivity, endeavours to find a language to record, represent and comprehend the atrocities of the war committed in Foca, a town in Eastern Bosnia subjected to an ethnic cleansing campaign at the hands of Serb military, police and paramilitary.
Silence of Reason is about the mass rape and sexual enslavement of women specifically, and its use as a systemic weapon. It resists the false normalisation of rape as an inevitable symptom and side issue of armed conflict, and its marginalisation from official history and collective memory. The harrowing, relentless nature of the subject, combined with the documentary’s formal experimentation and not-so-standard length (it clocks in at just over a succinct hour) will make wide release prospects few, but the significance of this deftly crafted and assiduously researched, feminist reckoning with a taboo aspect of the Bosnian War that continues to shape the countries of the former Yugoslavia, and Novakova’s efforts toward a way forward, should garner the full attention of documentary festivals programming at the more challenging end of the spectrum.
Masterfully assembled from forensic visual archive and women’s testimonies from the 2000 International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in the Hague, Silence of Reason overlays the accounts of rape survivors in text and identity-disguised voiceover onto still images and recorded footage of the sites of their terrorisation, once-idyllic village spots having surrealistically morphed in the upside-down hell of war into crime scenes. Bleached-out hues and staticky noise lend to a nightmarish sense of dread and distortion as these ‘90s traces swim in and out of our focus and consciousness like ghostly materials, while memories are non-sensationalistically, methodically revisited. Mirroring avoidant dissociation and the bodily intensity of traumatic recall, images blur and sharpen. These are things almost impossible to talk about, that survivors say they have tried to forget. The inexact contours of experiences too much to sit within come to us in clipped fragments. Rain on the camera lens in a storm is, at the same time, sensorially vivid.
Fragments from records reference bodies found on the bank of the Drina river, who buried them, and where. Identifying details (a red earring with three white stones, for instance) evoke with a jolt, among this data, the loss of individual personalities. Accounts tell in snatches the story of the campaign, from the time the atmosphere of the town shifted with the Serb capture of it, and neighbours stopped meeting with Bosniaks, to the rounding up and depositing of women in rape camps (converted from houses and the school) where they were repeatedly violated, under full knowledge and participation of the local police. The accumulative effect of these spare, unbearable testimonies in their repetition, is recognition of a pervasive control method to break spirits. One teenager, sold for 500 German marks and a truckload of washing powder, describes being trafficked to Montenegro, the black-bordered, compact frame feeding a sense of claustrophobic entrapment, even as the landscape rolls by vertiginously, shot from a moving car.
“We have to combat all impulses that mythologise the horrible,” is the film’s opening quote from Hannah Arendt, the Jewish philosopher and reporter who famously covered the 1961 trial of Nazi war criminal and Holocaust implementer Adolf Eichmann. Novakova joins forces with a legacy of feminist thinkers, artists and activists contributing to the gruelling project of researching and resisting sexual violence against women (in an end title, she thanks all similarly involved in this work). She amplifies the voices of the survivors who had the courage to go on the record and in so doing changed how certain atrocities are classed in international law, so that rape and sexual slavery could be prosecuted and punished as crimes against humanity.
Director, Producer: Kumjana Novakova
Editors: Jelena Maksimovic
Sound: Vladimir Zivkovic
Design: Elena Dinovska Zarapciev
Production companies: Medea (North Macedonia), Pravo Ljudski (Bosnia and Herzegovina)
Sales: Pravo Ljudski (Bosnia and Herzegovina)
Venue: Sarajevo (Documentary Competition)
In Bosnian, English.
63 minutes
