FERAL

In the 90s I spent all my school holidays in a small village in the north of Serbia where my grandparents used to take me in order for me to “be in the fresh air”. Thanks to my grandmother’s ability to make friends with many of the women in the village, I was able to listen to the stories about their everyday lives, their families, marriages, children, their plans for the future that they eagerly shared with my grandmother over coffee and cigarettes. On one of those occasions, I remember one of our neighbours sending me to stand by the door to warn her in case her husband arrives. “It makes him very angry when I smoke”, she would say with a rebellious smile. What I quickly learned from these stories was that even though these women would do equally demanding chores as their husbands and work just as hard, they were not entitled to the same benefits. Today, just like in the 90s, most women in the villages of Serbia are not allowed to have their own savings, they do not own the houses they live in and they cannot spend their free time in the village bars. Instead they are confined to the narrow space of a household which they can rarely leave and even there they are expected to follow strict rules. In Feral, I wanted to explore the possibilities of women breaking the physical and mental borders of this confined space through a twisted, surreal, dark narrative.
The three protagonists, Andjela, Jelena and Svetlana, decide to take up hunting, which has always been regarded as a strictly male activity in their community. In the beginning, they are only guided by curiosity – they have never shot anything in their lives and they would like to know how this feels. They go on their first hunting trip quietly and with a lot of insecurity, just the way they live their lives. But as they overcome the challenges, a transition happens that neither of the three had expected. They gain self-confidence and courage through the act of killing men. These men are not real, but rather representations of power that suppresses them and stops them from speaking and acting freely. Only when they learn how to oppose this power, will they be able to become liberated.