Thirty years ago, filmmaker Lidija Zelovic left her war-torn home of Sarajevo and fled to the Netherlands. Since then, she has been filming her dislocated family – her mother, father, brother and son. At IDFA, the director of Home Game [+lee también:
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entrevista: Lidija Zelovic
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Cineuropa: You’ve been making movies about your family and dislocation for 30 years. How does Home Game fit into your filmography?
Lidija Zelovic: You could see it as the final part in a trilogy: it’s somehow similar because I'm recycling some prior material. But the first two films were about the past, while this is about the future. Home Game starts in the past, but it's actually a lesson for the future.

Reworking the past is something that contemporary Balkan cinema does a lot because no one else has done it for us. But what triggered that shift from past to future for you?
Yes, and when someone else does, you can’t recognise yourself in it! When the West is teaching me about my history, I’m thinking “That’s all very nice, but I’m sorry, this comes from above!” As for the trigger, it was the sense of true danger I felt. Eight years ago, I admitted that it was all really bad, and at that time, I was writing for [Dutch] newspapers that didn’t want to recognise the political disasters that were upon us. I felt that nothing I said would come across, because people’s need to survive amidst a happy ending was stronger.

Why did you decide that the narration would be in the third person?
The film started off as a comedy. My thinking was: how can I show people that there is already huge polarisation in society? Because they are obviously getting used to it so slowly that they’re not managing to recognise the process. Oscar Wilde said, “If you want to tell people the truth, tell it with humour,” so I decided to make a comedy out of my family’s own prejudices, in order to expose the prejudices of the Dutch. But in the process, it got murkier, and the humour diminished, especially after the elections. I didn’t want to wag my finger, so it became important to bring them into this past that could be anyone’s: imagine a girl, it could be anyone, but let’s pick this one and call her Lidija.

Did this distance help you see the political dangers any more clearly?
When you’ve lived through a political disaster, you no longer see politics as something that happens during the evening news. Instead, you develop a very intimate relationship with it, and you become very sensitive to its tides. That was always the most important part of our movie, being able to bring us back in time, both myself, as a character in a film, and the viewer. It’s our collective memory, so the film is a portrait of both my family and of the Netherlands. And, to be honest, of Europe.

Themes of unity and individualisation also play a crucial part, but you do it in such an elegant way in comparison to the grand narratives of someone like Adam Curtis…
I love the films of Adam Curtis, but he’s usually saying how things are, and because I agree with him, I love it, but if I were to disagree, I probably wouldn’t watch his movies. I, on the contrary, beg of the people who don’t agree with me to watch my film! I really am desperate to change something; I’m so worried. At the same time, you know, at a festival like this, it’s often like you’re preaching to the choir.

Home Game switches between two languages, but do you personally feel like you’re different in Serbo-Croatian and in Dutch?
I definitely am. But it has to do with the fact that I’m using the two languages to recount different things. I’m not a different person, but I notice myself adapting to a persona in Dutch, which is helpful, of course. That’s why [also in the film] I can’t possibly speak Dutch to my son, because it’s not the emotional language I grew up with. That said, I’m only now starting to connect the two. I’ve noticed that linguistic separation when discussing politics: sometimes, what I say can be perceived differently. Even knowing myself very well didn’t save me from this self-correcting mechanism. But now, thanks to this film, I feel more able to connect the two parts of me.