Balkan Film Week 2025

A Quest

Marija Katalinić

This year’s Balkan Film Week selection takes you on a quest; a journey that rises above limitations and becomes a phenomenon in itself. The films selected for this year’s programme invite you to be a part of the process that showcases how desire and limitations celebrate and initiate personal quests that derive from conditions of lack or misfortune. The impulse to change one’s circumstances or to find a goal one considers worth investing time and resources in can inspire. Reasons for this voyage can be many; love, music, family, freedom, utopia, home. However, it is the force, or Élan vital in Henri Bergson’s oeuvre, that is the ground from which an action is initiated. How does one decide when their need or conditions are an opportunity to act or just a moment of fleeting inspiration?

The suggested force has often been part of cultural representations, from The Odyssey, James Joyce’s Ulysses, Tolkien’s books, “Thelma and Louise” to many more. All of the examples feature a particular set of reasons (internal or external) that trigger a quest or set the protagonists on an adventure. The pathway taken, and the process that entails are stories that create legends.

Sometimes the noted impulse seeks to creatively enrich by bringing together artists from different spheres and lands in order to create a new experience together, as Andreas Johnsen’s  film “Efterklang’’ showcases. At another time, a quest takes one on a more solitary search, setting off questions of belonging, identity and love. It is the importance of interpersonal relationships (here specifically family) and the weighty loss of these connections that triggers the main protagonist Ana to find herself in Dubravka Turić’s movie “Traces’’. Family represents a complex inter-generational and inter-personal space where other quests take place in this year’s programme. It is therefore no wonder that family and its entanglements are the main locus of a protagonist’s quest. In this respect, “Family Portrait of the Black Earth’’ is another depiction of how love and pain are juxtaposed. A lovely animated film, based on a short story of Yordanka Beleva, shows how the pain of a loved one sets one on a journey to creatively approach life’s challenges. “Like a Sick Yellow’’ and “Once Upon a Family’’ also work with the family narrative, but each in their unique way, addressing an “itch’’, a need that seeks to be found and understood.

A quest can also be articulated through our minds and bodies, as it testifies to conditions in which we were born into or have been conditioned by. In this respect, two documentary films, “As I Was Looking I Could See Myself Underneath’’ and “Wo/man’’, address bodies as sites of journeys within the public sphere. Evoking here the work of Michel Foucault, the French philosopher that famously tackled notions of sexuality, body, politics, society and control, the question of freedom to define oneself is investigated in the two films.

Foucault also worked with the notion of space and explored the term heterotopia, a definition of a site that in its very existence stands for spaces that exist “in-between’’, neither here nor there. Some of the examples of these sites are graveyards (such as in the film “Traces’’), but also asylums as seen in Radu Jude’s film “Scarred Hearts’’. Here, in one of those heterotopic spaces, a sanatorium, the limits of body, reality and fantasy blur and the impulse to exist in this liminal place is an adventure in itself. On the other hand, unlike Jude’s film, Karla Crnčević’s documentary “The Ground Where We Stand’’ grounds the endeavour of creating a utopia on an island’s landscape as the protagonists seek peace and a future within their community’s framework.

The programme ends with the meditative documentary “Sava” where a river is brought to life as a metaphor but also as a witness to history. Its borders usher instead of constrain, and its essence nurtures and connects. Given the gift of speech by the late distinguished actress Mira Furlan, the Sava river closes the circle of tales that this year’s film programme tries to relay – stories of quest, bravery, love, adventure and creativity.