New documentaries, shorts and feature-length, traditional and experimental films, formed the broadly conceived regional competition. As well as the Balkan countries, entries also included Austria. Isabel Jacobs extrapolates the program and the stories behind them, mostly of dislocation, social and political fragmentation.
In his opening speech, festival director Nenad Puhovski recalled a heartbreaking encounter with a former student, sometime in 1994. It was the midst of the Yugoslav Wars – the violent breakdown of an entire world. The horrors he experienced at the front had turned a funny and brilliant young filmmaker into a silent man with empty eyes. They would never meet again, and his last words stayed with Puhovski: “You know, professor, people don’t die in slow motion.” With new wars ravaging the globe, from Ukraine to Iran and Sudan, filmmakers still pick up the fragments of what remains. People don’t die in slow motion; yet it is film, like no other medium, that has the power to trace how violence fragments community – whether through a slow erosion over time or in a sudden explosion.
Social and political fragmentation were to run through seamlessly like a thread through the 22nd edition of ZagrebDox, whose program gathered films that oscillated between playfulness and brutality, nostalgia and shock. The camera is both prophetic and too late; it bears witness to conflict as it unfolds. The Fipresci jury had the privilege of seeing dozens of new documentaries – feature-length and shorts, traditional and experimental – from the regional competition; broadly conceived, these included Balkan countries, and also Austria. Both formally and thematically, many of the films were acts of recollection; they gathered scattered fragments of memory, family history, transit and trauma, bodies in motion, vanishing worlds and contested identities and truths.
The fragment as a form somewhere between broken shard and miniature is made explicit in Tatjana Božić’s charming, all-too-relatable Fragments of Belonging which has its world premiere at the festival. It is a deeply personal, at times defiantly cringe-inducing, exploration of loneliness and belonging, with the DIY feel of a home video. Tatjana – blurring the lines between director and subject of her own film – is lonely. Born in Croatia, she now lives in Amsterdam with her teenage son, single and bored, navigating motherhood and everyday life in a foreign country. Tatjana’s eccentric hippie vibes clash with the sobriety of Dutch society. Her sincere but awkward attempts to make friends or become ‘more Dutch’ mostly fall flat. Her son, often embarrassed, becomes a reluctant participant in her experiment to invite guests into the apartment.
Combining footage of their domestic life, shot by Sven Jacobs and Ton Peters, with family films, we gradually find out about Tatjana’s past. Her family is cursed by the fate of dispersal: her aunts decided to leave home to marry German men and become true ‘Swabians’, her best friend ended up in Zurich and Tatjana herself feels like a foreigner everywhere. In search of belonging, Tatjana sets off on a road trip across Europe, visiting relatives and friends. In one hilarious episode, she gets washed up in a Balkan bar on the outskirts of Vienna. There, she sings folk songs at the top of her voice and tears up with fellow ex-Yugos. They are all at a loss, feeling nostalgic about a country that no longer exists. Like Tatjana, those men belong nowhere. Ultimately, what fragments them is not just their own experience of exile but the rocky transition from the collective body of socialist Yugoslavia to the individualized lifestyle of Western Europe.
In Fragments of Belonging, socialism is a distant memory, refracted through Tatjana’s desire for community, friendship and a more collective way of life. Her film is messy, laugh-out-loud and unpolished. However, it lacks an overarching structure that is able to hold the fragments together. Ultimately, Božić’s film suggests that home might be nothing more than a brief moment of togetherness shared by always already dispersed individuals – less fragments of belonging than fragments of dislocation.
Late capitalist alienation and loneliness are also recurring themes in Mina Simendić’s This Desirable Device, a short film co-produced by Serbia and Germany. Like Fragments of Belonging, Simendić’s film is a confessional self-portrait, lighthearted, a little exhibitionist, and sometimes shallow. Yet it’s a lot of fun to watch and the voice-over feels fresh. A young Serbian art student moved to Germany to study film at the academy. There, she has the opportunity to work with expensive 16mm film stock – but at what cost?
The political message of This Desirable Device is undecided. At times, it has the feel of a Gen Z homage to Želimir Žilnik’s cult film Inventory – Metzstrasse 11 (1975) which features the tenants of a Munich apartment block, including ‘Gastarbeiter’ (migrant workers) from Yugoslavia, who proudly introduce themselves to the camera. Simendić’s film opens with ‘a racist Serbian’ joke about an ‘ethnic minority citizen’ – mocking German bureaucratic language – who got a ‘baustelle’ job, only to bring back nothing to his family.
Simendić explains the untranslatable obscene punch line as a joke about the death of the Balkan version of the American dream: Germany as a promised land of milk and honey. The film then morphs into a reflection on learning a foreign language and dealing with bureaucracy. It blends images from a Yugoslav family album with snippets from an Arabic language book (there’s some vague references to Palestine and socialist Algeria). The message is not entirely clear but Simendić’s tongue-in-cheek narration saves her work.
This Desirable Device constantly plays with breaking down the boundary between filmmaker and viewer; it makes the materiality of the medium palpable as we see the director handling film tape – this ‘desirable device’ provided by the German tax payer. In the age of TikTok and Instagram, with millions of hours of videos uploaded on YouTube every day, analogue film becomes an expensive relic of the past, maybe even a luxury object.
Do women make harsher films? This is what Ukrainian auteur Kira Muratova once quipped when Isa Willinger visited her in Odesa. Willinger’s latest film No Mercy sets out to interview some of the greatest women filmmakers of our time to ask them about violence and the ‘female gaze’, including Catherine Breillat, Virginie Despentes and Nina Menkes. Willinger’s intention to make No Mercy, she explained at a roundtable on women in the film industry, was to give the filmmakers a voice to speak about their own work, in critical response to Mark Cousins’ 14-hour Women Make Film.
No Mercy ultimately challenges the idea of one unified female gaze, suggesting that film itself creates a hybrid gaze that can be either aligned with or oppositional to existing conventions. Where the ‘female gaze’ tends to make essential women filmmakers, the counter-gaze or oppositional gaze opens up new possibilities of seeing differently. The gender balance in this year’s ZagrebDox was remarkable, with almost half the selected films directed by women. Among the highlights was Jelena Bosanac and Tanja Brzaković’s Remember my Song, a one-hour documentary about the small-town cult tavern ‘Jablan’ where the first shooting between Serbs and Croats took place in the 1990s.
In Bosanac and Brzaković’s film, the tavern becomes a symbol of Yugoslavia, both its carefree days and the violent breakdown of ‘ brotherhood and unity’. The film mixes found material and footage of the tavern’s ruins in Jugovo Polje. A found record salvaged from the wreckage opens a nostalgic time travel into the 80s. Remember my Song collages folk music with rewound VHS tapes and the voices of waiters, singers and cooks telling the story of Jablan’s heyday. Today, almost nothing remains of the tavern; the last scene has some of the protagonists dancing in the rubble.
Another film picking up the shards of a vanished country is Marta Popivoda’s remarkable short Slet 1988, which was univocally awarded the Fipresci prize, acknowledging Popivoda’s strong artistic vision and unique ability to rearticulate unresolved political issues. Slet 1988 is about Yugoslavia’s last great mass performance. It juxtaposes found footage with a portrait of seventy-four-year-old dancer Sonja Vukićević as she moves her body through a gym in New Belgrade.
Like Fragments of Belonging, Popivoda’s film problematizes the shift from a collective body to individualism, suggesting that new political collectives are gradually taking shape. Slet 1988 is a powerful document of how the socialist past continues to inscribe itself into flesh and minds, transforming hands, skin and muscles into a somatic archive. Violence and war are not a distant past or existing only on screen – people don’t die in slow motion. Speaking from the stunning Plitvice Lakes National Park – one of Croatia’s tourist hotspots – a young Ukrainian director went into detail about the war he experienced first-hand. One of his classmates, after waking up in a morgue one day, turned into the silent man with empty eyes that Nenad Puhovski would meet in the 1990s. As war and social division continue to fracture lives worldwide, the films of our time become fragments of a shared dislocation.
By Isabel Jacobs
Edited by Steven Yates
© FIPRESCI 2026