21/02/2024 - BERLINALE 2024: Birgitte Stærmose’s immersive and uncategorisable film, shot over a period of 15 years, was made in close collaboration with its four Kosovar protagonists

In 2009, when Danish filmmaker Birgitte Stærmose made the short Out of Love, she met several kids selling cigarettes on the streets of Prishtina. Staying in touch with some of them, in 2017, she returned to Kosovo to film a sequel with the same cast, who are credited as co-creators. The result is Afterwar [+see also:
interview: Birgitte Stærmose
film profile], which has just world-premiered in the Berlinale Panorama. The film can’t easily be classified as either documentary or fiction, mixing staged performances with real people and professional actors in a strongly immersive manner.

Opening with archive footage of the 1999 war – brief images of death, destruction and displacement – the film is split into three chapters: Past, Present and Future. In the first, we see the four co-creators, along with several other characters, as kids or teenagers. They look straight into the camera, telling us how they grew up in wartime, at times whispering, which intensifies the already very strong suggestiveness, supported by the low-level, ever-present sound design and music, often assuming a dissonant or quietly threatening key.

A particularly memorable survival story comes from Gëzim Kelmendi, who hid under a dying cow and then put the animal out of its misery. Asking, “Why should an animal suffer more than us?”, Gëzim is the most expressive of the four, a wannabe rapper with a difficult relationship with his father. Now that he has a son himself, he is adamant that he will always protect him.

On the other hand, Xhevaire Abdullahu, whose nickname is Xheva, has a strong connection with her mother, and in the Present segment, she speaks about her wish to build a house for her. She has a remarkable presence and inner strength that radiates from the screen. Meanwhile, Besnik Hyseni is the least talkative, but the pain in his eyes speaks volumes, and the few sentences we get from him might hold the biggest power. At 26, he is still selling peanuts to support his family. Sphresim Azemi is a devout Muslim, often shown praying, and is also the one with the most directly expressed opinions. He sums up the film's title: “War settles in people, like a plague.” And so “afterwar” is therefore a state of mind, a scar on the soul and a bleak pointer for the future.

There are a few other characters whom we see as kids, and then as young adults, including a girl whose words, “You think I am nothing. So I am nothing,” will haunt the viewer. Spoken in the lobby of the infamous Grand Hotel in Prishtina, they have a particular gravity that will be clear to those acquainted with the recent history of Kosovo – and for others, it will be a nowhere space, with a different but impactful connotation. The grown-up Xheva whispering, “To be poor is to live in shame” in a crowded disco is another hard-hitting example.

Stærmose faithfully captures the strange urban-rural-industrial vibe of Kosovo. Its nature has a rugged beauty, but its cities and villages were underdeveloped still in the times of Yugoslavia, and after the war, some of their suburbs have deteriorated, while there are construction sites everywhere. When one of the protagonists, as a kid, catches a fish with a plastic can in a brook under a concrete bridge, he cleans it on a rusty pipe. They are often shown, both as kids and as grown-ups, in an underpass in Prishtina's centre, a liminal space and a tunnel without any light at its end. This could, itself, be a metaphor for their state of mind, but also for their actual lives.

Afterwar is a co-production involving Denmark's Magic Hour Films, Kosovo's Kabineti, Sweden's Vilda Bomben Films and Finland's Oy Bufo Ab.