19/12/2023 - With her second feature, Selma Doborac pushes the limits of representation and probes the complexity of evil in a stylised, hybrid documentary

When it comes to representing evil, “do signs fail us, or do they just change?” asked Selma Doborac in her feature-length debut, Those Shocking Shaking Days [+see also:
trailer
film profile], back in 2016. The Bosnian-born, Austrian-based filmmaker has been interrogating the ethical limits of cinema throughout her career, always in uncompromising fashion. Those Shocking Shaking Days made use of black screen, static shots and dead space to challenge the dominant role of images, while hefty subtitles asked the tough questions in poignant, unforgiving prose. Tackling similar issues through inventive formalistic means, De Facto, the second feature by Doborac, premiered in this year’s Berlinale Forum and just last month won the Award for Best Feature Film in the Retueyos section of the Gijón Film Festival (see the news).

De Facto is about bare life, the state of exception, and extreme violence, but it decisively refuses to show any of that. What’s more, it doesn’t look like a film about these things at all. From the very first shot, we see a man, later credited as Actor 1 (Christoph Bach), sitting at a table. Its glass tabletop reflects the lush forest greenery, as seen through the windowless window frames of a white pavilion. We – the viewer, the camera – are inside that pavilion with Actor 1 while the wind rustles the leaves of the trees in the background. In a long take and from a side angle, he begins to speak and doesn’t stop for almost 30 minutes.

What follows is an avalanche of deadpan-delivered monologues, composed of verdicts and first-person confessions, witness testimonies and philosophical texts, all strung together in neat, cultivated prose. The man uses “I” to guide the viewer through the labyrinths of human grief, where pain and guilt are surgically removed: stories out of concentration or labour camps, hierarchies in deadlock, remorseless humiliation, mass killings, mass rape, and the world’s bloody legacy.

The complex, polished syntax and the vivid descriptions of torture it conjures up are at odds with one another. The static, endless take shows no mercy to the viewer as word after word of ceaseless brutality come at them like bullets: there’s nowhere to hide. Even when the scene ends and a shift in space introduces us to Actor 2 (Cornelius Obonya), whose testimonial is more philosophical in nature, there’s hardly any respite. But this kind of cinema doesn’t offer any comfort anyway. Doborac is one of the few filmmakers working today who experiments with film form and content in a way that renders the very epithet of “experimental” completely useless. Her cerebral approach to filmmaking disentangles the neat relationship between sign and signified, and puts the indexical nature of cinema on trial. What is an index? A remnant of a lived reality captured (or recreated) in 24 frames per second? Does a film bear any trace of the real world at all? When asking these questions within the context of extreme violence and perpetrators' testimonies, De Facto becomes a landmark, self-reflective work.

To say this film is hard to watch is an understatement; and to be honest, it’s not any easier to review. But if there’s a title that deserves to be called a “must-see”, that would be De Facto. If Joshua Oppenheimer and Errol Morris legitimised re-enactment as a valid technique in the documentary canon, Selma Doborac goes even further. Not only does she negate re-enactments; she invents new ways to stage and de-stage the relationship between world and film in a manner that’s radical and ethical to the highest degree.

De Facto is a co-production between Austria and Germany, and sixpackfilm is responsible for its world sales.