14/11/2024 - The director tells us about her video essay made from the testimonies of women who suffered violence in the so-called "rape camp" in Foča during the Balkan war

(© Almir Zrno)

After winning the Human Rights Award at Sarajevo, the Best Director Award at IDFA and the Best International Film Award at Cinéma du Réel, among others, Silence of Reason [+see also:
film review
interview: Kumjana Novakova
film profile] landed at the 7th Euro Balkan Film Festival in Rome (6-12 November), where it was presented out of competition. We took the opportunity to talk to the film’s director, Kumjana Novakova.

Cineuropa: What motivated you to make this film and bring back these terrible stories now? Was it difficult to access the archives? 
Kumjana Novakova: My work is created from my own position: a woman (as a political subject) born in Yugoslavia, growing up during the wars of the 1990s and living the multiple (and still ongoing) transitions, enduring and working on the peripheries of neoliberal colonial Europe. Understandably, it is not really about me deciding for a specific topic: I can only engage with the processes that shape me, that “make me”, so as to make sense of the world. Violence these days is our only reality. Imperialism knows no other language. So, it is extremely important at the current moment, unfortunately, to speak from the position of survival of violence – especially at times when we are once again witnessing sexual crimes and torture being committed and not prevented and not even reported, as is the case with Palestinian women, Ukrainian women, and women in general. 

The ICTY archive is a public and open-for-all archive, and one can make use of it in any way. The only problem is that you have to learn the language of the court in order to be able to simply find things inside. With this film, as with the rest of my work, I try to develop a cinematic language that is integral to the environment that is to be re-created by the film. In Silence of Reason that meant a feminist film language that comes from the archive itself, but which also questions the hierarchies of the film form. We tried to develop a language based on tenderness and care, a language that confronts the hierarchies of the archive and the archival film languages.

The work on the sound, with the constant background noises, and the fact that the crime is never depicted, let alone the victims – it makes one think of Jonathan Glazer's The Zone of Interest [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile]: is this a new way of telling horror, since we have now seen – and see – everything already?
For me and all the collaborators I work with in continuity, as the editor Jelena Maksimovic and the sound designer Vladimir Zivkovic, we struggle to find the form inside the material. Some of the decisions we make are political or theoretical positions – as for example, never to use material related to the perpetrators, or language based on violence (or crime), rather than survival. We will never create a subjectivity in cinema around violence. It will always be around survival and resistance. We have to get as close as possible to the ones who survived, to the ones who preserve life. 

At first there seems to be no correlation between images, sounds and texts. The words are precise, while the images are often distorted. What artistic choices guided you?
The decisions in artistic terms come from a long process of simply looking at the archive, reordering it, and just noticing. I re-archive each found element not as an evidence to a potential narrative, but as a potential entry point to this world I am trying to build on screen, even when I do not know how this world will look like. But this process is guided by very precise protocols: which elements will be taken into consideration, which are the limits of the archive, what is the method of re-archiving, etc. From these processes different correlations start to emerge, and we as a team then slowly develop sensibilities around how to navigate inside this world built by the archive. When that moment is reached, the artistic choices are obvious, one has to just tune into their senses. 

As a filmmaker (and a Yugoslav woman), how do you cope emotionally with such a topic? And how do you think a woman, as a victim, can heal from such trauma?
Women are survivors! The concept of victim is, unfortunately, a patriarchal concept that makes submission possible. The idea of coping emotionally is also for me quite challenging as a concept. My way of taking care of myself and of making sure that I am not generating a violent space of creation for all other collaborators comes not from some neoliberal practices of individual care, but from the development of artistic languages of care, tenderness and support. The way we treat our images, our narratives, the discourse we produce with our work. This is the only way one can re-traumatise oneself and traumatise others. Silence of Reason is a space of generational solidarity, and the generous collaboration of the whole team gave each of us so much strength and made us believe that we can transform our traumas into knowledge.