Number my Wanderings

Shortly before the beginning of the civil war in Yugoslavia, I moved to Berlin with my family.

We didn't plan to stay for long, but the circumstances in our country forced us to continue life in exile.
I have a strong personal motivation for this project.

When the Syrian refugees came to Berlin, I became friends with many of them and discovered a number of commonalities – one of them being the experience of following a war from a distance.

Like my Syrian friends and at a rather young age, I sometimes sat in front of the TV watching horrific images of war. Images of destroyed cities I knew and dead bodies lying on the ground.
With my last project, “Children of Spring”, I dealt with my friends' escape across the Mediterranean, in a personal and experimental way. With a happy ending that is: the arrival in Germany.

The experiences we shared during the process of preparation, shooting and post production was a liberating and constructive way to work on our individual and collective traumas.

The current project called "Number my Wanderings" will be a continuation of this story: The refugees have arrived but how do they go on living in the safe and protected new world they're now in?

With a highly stylized and bizarre presentation of the bureaucratic apparatus in an absurd fictional institution - a church.
The church represents the police, the job centre and a church – a mixed apparatus of a state.

My idea is to create a world that reflects our reality. The film is not meant as a criticism of institutions, but rather a reflection of a complicated system.

Both, the refugees and the officials within institution, are victims of this system.
When I wrote the dialogue, I drew inspiration from the absurdity of Samuel Beckett's work. Similar to his plays, I tried to develop humorous and grotesque situations.

For example, with the character who is the director of the refugee centre. She throws from the church's balcony an employment contract of a refugee into the air, which leads to stacks of papers flying through the large room. Or in the panic scene when, due to the sound of an airplane, the refugees think they are being bombed and run through the church in confusion and panic.

I want to establish a place of confession as a space for the absurd and at the same time initiate dialogue between some of the refugees and the priest.

The look of the film will be in a Cinemascope widescreen format and shot in black and white. A slow- moving camera, long shots, combining the crowd scenes in the church with close-up shots to capture the expressive emotions in the protagonists' faces. The expansive church will allow the camera a tremendous freedom of movement.

I have already worked on the melody of the song "Heimatlos" - originally by pop star Freddy Quinn - with a musician and two versions have been created as a result. An organ melody and a soprano version.

I don't want to convey an explicit message with the film, and especially not a moral one.
 To bring intense emotion, the lost state of a group of people and the combined absurdity and tragedy of a bureaucratic apparatus, closer to the viewer - that would be my goal.