Reznica

When I think about my childhood, I always remember
my grandma’s pie and the smell of cinnamon in that room.
To me, that’s what home feels like.
- Borislav Vilotić

This film is part of the Reznica project, which I am working on with my Italian colleagues, the photographer Marco Carmignan and the anthropologist Lorenzo Scalchi. Our research started in 2016 when we were interested in migrants still crossing Serbia along the Balkan route. We soon wondered how a country, which still has many refugees from the Yugoslav wars, welcomes migrants. We learned that for about 6 months at the end of 2016, in the Krnjača collective center, refugees from Croatia and Bosnia lived together with the migrants, but we were not able to catch it with the camera. At that time, the Commissariat for Refugees and Migration closed the refugee centers, and the construction of prefabricated houses and apartments for refugees was widespread. What it means to move to new houses after almost 30 years of living in collective centers. Then we met people from the collective center Varna, the last center in line to be closed, who did not want to leave it and did not want to move into new prefabricated houses. We soon realized that a "roof over your head" was not enough for a house to be called home. We wanted to describe that feeling of home, that is, to enable people who have never had a voice in public, to explain what home means to them.
The first approach was to record conversations and interviews and it was immediately clear to us that their voice would be, both in the book and in the film, the formal core of the whole story. People could hardly wait to tell someone about their misfortunes because they had no one for years, they had no psychological support and many suffered from PTSD. So it was important to make the recording equipment as simple as possible so as not to scare the people I had chosen for the lead roles. Reflex camera, three lenses, a tripod and two microphones, nothing more.
There is another reason why manageable equipment was needed. I began to think that it would be interesting for those people, who I asked "where is your home?", to confront that place. This meant traveling and filming their journey home. So the journey is one of the basic structures of the film, in which images from the past and places are engraved and parts of the interview flow as their consciousness.
In Mirjana's case, the journey is a tension, a conflict between past and present. Her journey begins and ends with photos from a family album, which are now embedded in her mind. As for Borislav, the boy was born in a collective center, the conflict within him is that he is not completely a refugee and he is not completely a Serb, he does not have a house of his own. His home is “not having a home”, his journey is a search for that place and crosses various landscapes. The tension is between the spaces: Belgrade, the collective center, prefabricated houses, a cemetery in Croatia, etc.).
Aesthetically, we can say that, if Mirjana's part is a vremeplov (navigating in time), Boro's part is a prostoroplov (navigating in spaces). I like this metaphor because in the final part of the film Borislav is sailing on the Sava with the boat he works on as a tour guide.
Talking to these people was very touching. The intention is to convey those emotions to viewers because losing a home can happen to anyone in the world, suddenly. It has happened to many, it will happen again. I haven't lived in my home myself since my parents moved to Italy. It is important to understand and respect other people's feelings and create new homes together.