CHILDREN ARE WATCHING US
About the narrative in the feature film "The Enclave" by Goran Radovanović
The surreal daily life of the Serbian civilians in the rare enclaves in present-day Kosovo can potentially represent an extraordinarily inspiring theme for filmmakers. Despite that, with the exception of several courageous documentary reports (recorded immediately after the arrival of KFOR and the first pogroms against Serbs in the southern province in 1999 and 2000) - so far only Sonja Blagojević, in her feature-length documentary Kosma filmed in 2013, tackled the complicated task of covering this topic in a concrete, feature film form. Goran Radovanović goes back to this issue in an entirely different form of a feature film with his The Enclave resulting from a Serb-German co-production, and completed in 2014. The boy who observes daily his homeland through the oblong little window of a KFOR armored personnel carrier that Italian troops drive him in to and from school; the deserted Serbian school attended by just one pupil, which definitely closes down when the last remaining teacher leaves; the constant feeling of anxiety and danger that the remaining, rare Serbs - tracked by the cross-hairs of automatic weapons - have grown accustomed to, just as they have to the air they breathe, are all motifs taken from the painful reality that the author skillfully blends into a unique and rounded narrative of his feature film. From compelling, factual scenes of everyday life reactivated archaic forms stand out, two ritually and mythically founded motives which also constitute the backbone of the plot and the background for the culmination and the denouement of Radovanović's film: the death and the burial of the oldest member of the Serbian household, and the engagement and the wedding in a neighboring Albanian home. Still, key momentum to the plot is given by the motive of the need sensed by the lonely Serb boy (played by Filip ubarić) to play with his Albanian peers (Denis Murić, Nenad Stanojković and Milan Sekulić). It's an unusual game: dangerous and full of mistrust, but soon enough harmless too; a game between enemies, guided by specters of the past which occasionally allows - thorough children's oblivion for reality, to tear down barriers of centuries old intolerance and carefully cultivated hatred. Their relationship, evolving in the playing field unfenced by crude reality, reflects in a weird, twisted way the rapport of their parents and of the feuding ethnic groups. In the constant and dizzying ambiguity of the game, the narrative resists the temptation to slip into non-reality of fairy tales, or into cheap and pathetic "politically correct" propaganda on coexistence and tolerance. In the critical moment, the legacy of hatred and traumas from the recent past will still burst out from the playful boys - and after this dramatic culmination, The Enclave is resolved through a non-linear, skipping and mosaic, fully unconventional narrative which harbors the greatest value and the salient feature of Radovanović's new film. With a precise as well as unusual and unpredictable combination of parallel editing with flash-forwards and deliberate omission of important segments of the plot, the author compiles - with the great help of the editor Andrija Zafranović (whose contribution to this film exceeds by far the usual professional parameters) - the entirety using an approach and a form of narration typical of artistic films. Because the effect of the chosen non-linear, elliptical and leaping storytelling in the final third of The Enclave is not used up just in the stressed tension and drama in the suggestiveness of scenes that amplify the empathy of the viewers with the drama of the protagonist, the ten-year-old boy Nenad. Along with the emphasized catharsis, this approach also brings, in the film finale, undeniable poetic qualities, unusualness and revived secrecy of reality that emerges from the decomposed infantile experience of the adult world. David Lynch lucidly noted in an interview that childhood is a sort of drunkenness and ontological intoxication with the world and life, and The Enclave discretely gives us back that experience, suggesting it with its very structure, and thoughtfully selected and executed storytelling strategy.
Srdjan Vučinić
About the narrative in the feature film "The Enclave" by Goran Radovanović
The surreal daily life of the Serbian civilians in the rare enclaves in present-day Kosovo can potentially represent an extraordinarily inspiring theme for filmmakers. Despite that, with the exception of several courageous documentary reports (recorded immediately after the arrival of KFOR and the first pogroms against Serbs in the southern province in 1999 and 2000) - so far only Sonja Blagojević, in her feature-length documentary Kosma filmed in 2013, tackled the complicated task of covering this topic in a concrete, feature film form. Goran Radovanović goes back to this issue in an entirely different form of a feature film with his The Enclave resulting from a Serb-German co-production, and completed in 2014. The boy who observes daily his homeland through the oblong little window of a KFOR armored personnel carrier that Italian troops drive him in to and from school; the deserted Serbian school attended by just one pupil, which definitely closes down when the last remaining teacher leaves; the constant feeling of anxiety and danger that the remaining, rare Serbs - tracked by the cross-hairs of automatic weapons - have grown accustomed to, just as they have to the air they breathe, are all motifs taken from the painful reality that the author skillfully blends into a unique and rounded narrative of his feature film. From compelling, factual scenes of everyday life reactivated archaic forms stand out, two ritually and mythically founded motives which also constitute the backbone of the plot and the background for the culmination and the denouement of Radovanović's film: the death and the burial of the oldest member of the Serbian household, and the engagement and the wedding in a neighboring Albanian home. Still, key momentum to the plot is given by the motive of the need sensed by the lonely Serb boy (played by Filip ubarić) to play with his Albanian peers (Denis Murić, Nenad Stanojković and Milan Sekulić). It's an unusual game: dangerous and full of mistrust, but soon enough harmless too; a game between enemies, guided by specters of the past which occasionally allows - thorough children's oblivion for reality, to tear down barriers of centuries old intolerance and carefully cultivated hatred. Their relationship, evolving in the playing field unfenced by crude reality, reflects in a weird, twisted way the rapport of their parents and of the feuding ethnic groups. In the constant and dizzying ambiguity of the game, the narrative resists the temptation to slip into non-reality of fairy tales, or into cheap and pathetic "politically correct" propaganda on coexistence and tolerance. In the critical moment, the legacy of hatred and traumas from the recent past will still burst out from the playful boys - and after this dramatic culmination, The Enclave is resolved through a non-linear, skipping and mosaic, fully unconventional narrative which harbors the greatest value and the salient feature of Radovanović's new film. With a precise as well as unusual and unpredictable combination of parallel editing with flash-forwards and deliberate omission of important segments of the plot, the author compiles - with the great help of the editor Andrija Zafranović (whose contribution to this film exceeds by far the usual professional parameters) - the entirety using an approach and a form of narration typical of artistic films. Because the effect of the chosen non-linear, elliptical and leaping storytelling in the final third of The Enclave is not used up just in the stressed tension and drama in the suggestiveness of scenes that amplify the empathy of the viewers with the drama of the protagonist, the ten-year-old boy Nenad. Along with the emphasized catharsis, this approach also brings, in the film finale, undeniable poetic qualities, unusualness and revived secrecy of reality that emerges from the decomposed infantile experience of the adult world. David Lynch lucidly noted in an interview that childhood is a sort of drunkenness and ontological intoxication with the world and life, and The Enclave discretely gives us back that experience, suggesting it with its very structure, and thoughtfully selected and executed storytelling strategy.
Srdjan Vučinić