The Son

Being the mother of two teenagers, I wanted to make a film inspired by my personal experience of raising children in present-day Sarajevo. As an author, I find it intriguing to tell a story about both raising children and growing up as a child in a family living in a city. What makes me most interested in this family system is the fact that almost all of the family members are working hard – to the best of their knowledge – to make things work and that everyone's intentions are generally good, but it often happens that the results are disappointing. The dynamics in the relationships between parents, between children, and between parents and children is something that makes this story very much a reflection of real life.

This is the story of Arman and his upbringing – a now eighteen-year-old boy adopted as a baby by a family who, after four years from the adoption, welcomed a biological son. It is not easy to walk in shoes of an adopted child – a young person who might not find closure in the struggle to find his own identity, the truth about who he is and who his real parents are, whether he is good enough, and what kind of genes he has inherited.

This story is also about fourteen-year-old Dado, a boy who finds a role model in his older brother Arman. At his age, Dado is fascinated with how Arman is being cheeky with their parents, careless about school, full of adrenaline, and the main bloke in the "gang".

While Arman steadily matures and starts understanding the consequences of his actions, Dado, inconspicuously, turns from a good son into a troubled teenager. Amidst all of this, Mother and Father find the city where they both grew up and the society in which they live and work, to be changed beyond recognition. Neither psychologists, nor social workers are of help, because teenagers growing up in Sarajevo, which is still recovering from the consequences of war twenty years later, is more a matter of global currents, of force majeure, and the city's inner energy.

Arman's intense turmoils, tremendous energy, and excess adrenaline are being followed from one scene to the other throughout the film. Arman is constantly on the move and we are constantly in motion with him. His energy takes us through the film all the way down to the scene where we see that, for all the potential harm to Dado and for all the negative events, the blame could be placed on Arman – despite the fact that through the whole story he has tried to protect Dado and to prove both to himself and his parents that he truly was Dado's big brother.

In the characters of Dado and Arman, and their generation, we see the reflection of the city itself, which is also on a quest for its identity – Sarajevo is also a character of this film. Its neighbourhoods, its failed companies, ruined and destroyed olympic games facilities, war remembrance museum, workers residential blocks of buildings, houses without facades, renewed Academy of Arts and new facilities built, minefields around it all – they are all components and elements that are shaping life in the city as one of the key blocks for building up the protagonists and the characters.

The cast, where I persist with the same actors (Uliks Fehmiu, Emir Hadžihafizbegović, Jasna Ornela Bery, and introducing now Snežana Bogdanović), is my way of creating author continuity and signature in story-telling. In the short film Starting over (a part of the Some Other Stories omnibus) I was telling the story of a young man that was happening immediately after the war; his girlfriend, who is a foreigner to this country, abruptly leaves him and deprives him of their unborn child. This was a story about the international community's relationship with BiH during the war and later on. In my first feature film, Our Everyday Life, I was dealing with the character of a thirty-two-year-old who, after his foreigner wife leaves him, goes back to living with his parents for existential reasons; post-war society gives him no opportunity to work, live on his own and have a better future. It's the experience of my generation and the generation of my friends.

With the new film, The Son, I want to tackle the issue of the third generation, the one born after the war and whose parents were participants in the war and lost their loved ones. That's why Mother and Father from my previous films are now Grandmother and Grandfather, and their son has become the father of Arman and Dado and is dealing with all the problems of raising teenagers in today's Sarajevo.
I set the action of this story in Sarajevo's Mahala , in an old Bosnian house that Senad has inherited from his parents. To him, it is both a reminder of his origins, but also a kind of burden, as it constantly requires new investment. Through several scenes of bicycle riding, I wanted to present life and living in the traditional Sarajevo Mahala, with its idiosyncrasies, in respect to both the lifestyle and the oriental building construction. Through the scene of the Byram/Eid lunch, I want to show the Bosnian tradition of celebrating religious holidays within the family. Making the story about a Muslim family, I wanted to make a distinction in relation to the general point of view on Bosnian Muslims nowadays: Bosnian Muslims have a completely different tradition than those from Turkey or the Middle East. For this reason, to me, as the author, the framework within which the story happens is extremely important – it does not burden, but only provides colour and atmosphere to the story.

In respect to film costumes, those should be the contemporary outfit, in harmony with time that we live in and the colours that we and the director of photography chose.
The Set Designer will have free hand to deploy his creative solutions so as to round the above described visual identity of the film.
As for the music in the film, I decided to choose a composer from this region, as I think that this particular film will need a special sensibility that would make the music, the tones and the sounds contribute to the tension-filled, punch-in-the-stomach atmosphere which has to hold grip on us throughout the whole film. This uncertainty must be kept to the end of the film because we do not know how the story of the two teenagers and their parents will end.
That is why both the soundtrack and the camera movement - sometimes hectic, sometimes calm, depending on Arman's mood – should work in harmony in order to create the special world of this film in colour, albeit somewhat faded – as is the city in which Arman and Dado grow up.

Ines Tanović