27/08/2021 - With the help of a medieval epic poem, the Serbian director intends to reinvigorate his cultural heritage

Strahinja (Ibrahim Koma) and his wife, Ababuo (Nancy Mensah-Offei), left Ghana with hopes of a better future. Now, stranded in Serbia, only aspiring footballer Strahinja seems to have a chance at a career. But then Ababuo disappears. We talked to Serbian director Stefan Arsenijević about his Karlovy Vary competition title As Far as I Can Walk [+see also:
film review
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interview: Stefan Arsenijević
film profile].

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Cineuropa: There seem to be quite a few filmmakers who have also been inspired by old poems or folktales recently. What is happening? It feels like a revolution.
Stefan Arsenijević: And I thought it was just in my head! The moment you start working on something, you see everyone else doing it, so I thought it was just my perception. But it’s not. There is just something about tradition, you know? About living in these times, which are so uncertain and different. You need something stable, I guess. Or you need to reconsider what tradition is and adapt it to the new reality.

Does the voice-over in the film recount the exact same story? [Arsenijević decided to use the lines from the poem Strahinja Banović]
I edited it a bit, but it’s the original poem. I had this feeling that it could add another layer to what is happening. Sometimes it’s a commentary, and sometimes it stands in complete contrast to what you see because the poem is about a noble Serbian knight who rides a white horse, and this is an African migrant, who walks for miles and miles. Still, it’s the same story. Using this old traditional Serbian poem helped me find the right angle – it shows our cultural heritage from another perspective. Of course, some are not too happy about it, but our heritage should be alive instead of gathering dust in some museum somewhere.

All famous tales are always about somebody’s journey. But you rarely think of refugees as these ultimate travellers now, I guess?
We think of migrants in a very abstract way. Our mission was to give them individuality. Their main problem is not that they are migrants; it has to do with their personal relationships, with love. What happens to Strahinja and Ababuo could happen to all of us. When we were writing the script, some people said we should focus more on the conflict. But our statement, and I say “our” because three of us [Arsenijević, Bojan Vuletić and Nicolas Ducray] wrote it, was different: migrants don’t just have “migrant” problems; they have human problems.

In films dedicated to their stories, women are so often shown as mothers and wives. You rarely hear what they have to say, but you gave Ababuo a voice.
We wanted to use something traditional and be modern about it. Obviously, it meant having a strong female character, who is also an artist. The poem is about infidelity. But the main character goes against traditional rules to find his love, even though he was told that she is in love with somebody else. He forgives her. I thought it was really interesting because today, there are so many films about revenge, not forgiveness. Also, it was very important to understand that they love each other. They really do, but it doesn’t mean that she doesn’t have other needs. She needs to find her own fulfilment, and I find these ambivalent love stories very intriguing. He understands how much he cares for her also during that journey.

Did you talk to many people who crossed borders like that?
I live in Belgrade, and when this migrant crisis started, I would see thousands of people coming to Serbia every day. There was this taxi driver, and he told me that a family of refugees wanted him to drive them to the Hungarian border. He had to refuse – if the police had stopped him, he would have lost his licence on account of human smuggling. I experienced war and poverty, living in the former Yugoslavia, so for me, these are not some abstract victims. But I also wanted to be authentic about these particular refugees, today. I spoke to so many of them, and all the people you see, all the extras, are actual migrants from the refugee camps. There was always someone who had had that experience who could tell us if we were getting it wrong.

It’s not just about survival in your film – they have big dreams, both of them. And, as Ababuo tells a journalist, she is not “a fucking migrant”; she is a person.
She is an actress, so she feels comfortable in front of the news camera. She wants to be seen – it’s part of her job. One of the migrants I met, also from Ghana, was a role model for the main character, and he also wanted to be a professional football player. He would train with a local team but couldn’t play any official games until he had got his asylum papers. And getting asylum in Serbia is a long, long process. Which is why I was so happy when I heard that several migrants had got accepted into the Faculty of Applied Arts in Belgrade recently. A lot of them are artists, but when you say “migrants”, you don’t imagine different personalities. We wanted to address that.