29/08/2008

Is it a "regurgitation of the war" that Mehir feels rise up in his stomach, reaching his head and heart? Or is it merely "matrimonial empathy", the same sickness that his wife has been suffering since she discovered she was pregnant?

Forty-year-old Tuzla-born director Namik Kabil studied in Los Angeles before settling in Sarajevo, where he set his debut feature, Nightguards. Full of black humour, the film reflects on the post-war years in former Yugoslavia.

A large furniture and kitchen fittings shop forms the microcosm inhabited by the title’s two protagonists, Mehir and his colleague Brizla. These two nightguards battle with their everyday obsessions, which are the symptom of a deep unease that goes back to the wreckage of a war that 15 years ago forever left its mark on the soul of the survivors.

Watching Nightguards, as viewers we ask ourselves how a nation could possibly recover from a conflict in the third millennium in this age of economic and social globalisation, of the Jacuzzi and the Nokia N85 (see the magnificent short by de Oliveira which opened the Venice Film Festival). We ask ourselves how individuals could return to live a "normal" life and emerge from the alienation, just as one wakes up from a bad dream.

Kabil doesn’t provide any answers, but peppers his film with subtle signs and symbols, closing with the impossibly innocent image of a tiny kitten drinking milk.

(Translated from Italian)