An absorbing and imaginative feature-length debut from Serbia-born, Norway-based documentary maker Nataša Urban, The Eclipse revisits the Balkan wars of the 1990s through a highly personal lens, foregrounding the memories of the director’s family and friends from this tragic era, with the horrors of war mostly occurring off-screen. Making the inspired formal decision to use excepts from her father Borislav’s meticulously detailed hiking diaries as a loose narrative spine, Urban finds moments of pastoral beauty and uplifting humanism in these shared recollections, but also buried trauma and troubling evasions too. Following its prize-winning premiere at CPH:DOX in April, this multi-layered memory palace is screening at Sarajevo Film Festival this week, which feels like a homecoming of sorts. More festival play is assured, while broadcasters and art-house platforms should also show interest.
Films about the bloody ethnic cleansing and genocidal violence unleashed by the break-up of the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s are a regular festival fixture in Sarajevo. Inevitably so, given that history is still raw in the Bosnian capital, which was under a brutal wartime siege from Serbian military forces just 30 years ago. But The Eclipse defies genre conventions on this much-covered theme, using a mosaic of hazy private anecdotes and half-remembered events to interrogate an entire nation’s collective amnesia over its dark record of war crimes. Although this was not Urban’s intention, the film gains an extra layer of relevance in 2022, as timely echoes of Russian’s brutal ongoing invasion of Ukraine are impossible to avoid.
The eclipse of the film’s title has both a literal and symbolic meaning. Urban contrasts the positive, progressive, scientifically engaged way in which the socialist state of former Yugoslavia greeted a solar eclipse back in 1961 with the much more suspicious, superstitious reactions of the Serbian authorities to a later eclipse in 1999. As an allegory for a nation’s decline, this juxtaposition feels a little crude and fuzzy, more poetic conceit than sturdy comparison. But the essential notion of an entire state willfully embracing darkness works as a general metaphor for modern-day Serbia, with its continuing legacy of shady politicians and collective un-remembering.
Urban draws us into The Eclipse with an endearingly colourful chorus of gossipy characters: her parents, two grandmothers, a feisty aunt, a younger brother, plus various old friends and contemporaries. All share their bittersweet reminiscences, comical and warm, silly and tender, but turning increasingly dark as war becomes a daily fact of life. Still a spry and active senior, the director’s father sportingly recreates some of his 1990s hiking trips for the camera. His journals from the period, extracted in voice-over, serve as incongruously sunny counterpoint to the atrocties being committed all around him at the time, sometimes in the next village. Seemingly oblivious to the horror, Borislav forensically records his precise hours in fresh air, weather conditions, joyous encounters with wild animals and more. “I delay my meal because of the large number of ladybirds,” is one of his more poetic diary entries.
On one level, this devotion to wholesome nature worship serves as a wholly understandable distraction from life during wartime. Indeed, Borislav himself insists it was better to take his family on a healthy mountain hike than to dwell on “how pointless and tragic life is”. But as her film progresses, and the bodies mount up, Urban’s tone becomes more critical, calling our her father when he appears to downplay Serbian atrocities, notably the infamous massacre of more than 8000 Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica in 1995. “Even today I don’t quite understand Srebrenica,” he ponders, earning an prickly rebuke from his daughter.
Shot on a contrasting mix of celluloid film stocks, The Eclipse has a striking and artful aesthetic. Urban and her cinematographer Ivan Markovic use glossy 16mm for contemporary scenes, typically framed in painterly static compositions, and more grainy 8mm to represent hazy subjective memories and historical reconstructions. Many of these flashback sections are captured on ancient film, hand-processed in unusual materials to give it extra degraded texture, including coffee and vegetable oil. Archive stills also feature heavily in this dreamlike montage movie, alongside unrelated but resonant motifs, from a luminous moon to a pig being slaughtered.
The film’s atmospheric score by Jared Blum and Bill Gould, mournful electronica punctuated by a plaintively twanging Jew’s harp, also deepens its slow-burn emotional force. In a sweet piece of symmetry, Gould is best known for playing bass guitar with US alt-rock band Faith No More, a favourite of Urban’s younger brother Igor back in the 1990s, as fleetingly mentioned in the background narration here.
As The Eclipse ends, family and friends become wary that Urban, exiled from Serbia for decades, is planning to trash her former homeland. They implore her to highlight the good as well as the bad: picturesque lakes, fragrant meadows, excellent bookshops. “When you take a close look, we are not bad people,” one speaker insists. To its credit, this humane and thoughtful film does not condemn an entire nation, But Urban does conclude with a gloomy coda noting that Serbia’s current authoritarian president, Alexsandar Vucic, is a former ally of notorious war criminal Slobodan Milosevic. It comes as no surprise to learn that Vucic, even today, is also a prominent supporter of Vladimir Putin.
Director, screenplay: Nataša Urban
Cinematographer: Ivan Markovic
Editor: Jelena Maksimovic
Music: Jared Blum, Bill Gould
Production company: Medieoperatørene (Norway)
World sales: Taskovski Films, London
Venue: Sarajevo Film Festival (Dealing With The Past)
In Serbian
109 minutes
