Analyses of War

A deep animosity passed from generation to generation, a land afflicted by constant conflict… That is Ukraine in Like Dew in the Sun. Director Peter Entell revisits the country from which his grandparents once fled to escape pogroms; with an old photograph in his hand, he discovers that destructive nationalism is still present. As if the collective memory of the nation was forever damaged and unable to recover.

The fragile relation between national identity, history and memory is explored in Description of a Struggle by Chris Marker. He finds that each of us carries past conflict within ourselves which is passed on to others. The film essay about the then young state of Israel won the Golden Bear at Berlin International Film Festival in 1960.

Another perspective of war – as an archetypal force and an actual phenomenon – is presented in Fragment 53 by directing duo Federico Lodoli and Carlo Gabriele Tribbioli. They analyse war based on the portraits of prominent Liberian fighters through whose accounts they reveal the universal dimensions of war conflicts.

In her film Those Shocking Shaking Days, Selma Doborac revisits the atrocities of the war in Bosnia. She reflects on the ways and possibilities of depicting war as well as on the impact of frequent explicit depiction of violence on people and their ability to perceive its meaning.

What has war left for the next generations? The short Real Man’s Film directed by Nebojša Slijepčević, the winner of this year’s Doc Alliance Selection Award, shows the impact of war on the generations to come. Like Chris Marker, Slijepčović observes how past conflicts remain in us but he also shows hope. However, the balance is always fragile and even a small change can trigger the war again…