Vladimir Perišic: “Lost country is inspired by my adolescence in the heart of wars”
The Serbian director recounts the rebellion of a teenager against his mother, spokesperson for the criminal Karadžić regime in 1996 Serbia, in a brilliant political feature film. Encounter.
Your first feature film, Ordinary peopledates back to 2009. In 2014, you participated in the collective film Sarajevo Bridges but why did you wait all these years to tackle your second feature?
Vladimir Perišić: This is the result of several circumstances. I turned Ordinary people before the arrest of Radovan Karadžić. There was a sort of urgency for me to make this film as a poetic and ethical gesture as long as his genocidal crimes were not punished. It then took me a while to regain the need to shoot. During this period, I launched a publishing house in Belgrade and an arthouse film festival. But above all I realized that my need to make films was linked to the 90s and the aftermath of the wars which took place in former Yugoslavia. Whenever I tried to write a script that was about something else, I always ended up giving up because I didn’t feel the need to follow through. But I also believe that I needed time to pass, for the noise of the war to dissipate, for the Hague trial to end, to immerse myself in it again and create a story. Then when I had the idea of Lost country, it was not an easy project to receive in Serbia and therefore to finance! So it took a while. And then as I started casting Lost country, COVID has arrived! This is why and how all these years have passed.
Why did you choose to tell the story of Serbia in 1996 through the prism of a 15-year-old teenager?
I myself was 14 when the war started. So I wanted to tell how a boy of that age would gradually become aware of the political and historical situation of the country where he grew up and grow through this by emancipating himself from his mother, spokesperson for the Serbian government. chaired by Karadžić, while student demonstrations are growing in the streets against election rigging.
And how did you mirror the character of the mother?
I assume that politicians are also actors. When she comes home the evening of the party, it’s like she was coming home from the theater. So I’m almost filming a documentary on my actress Jasna Djuricic and I’m dealing with what and who she is
This is the second time that you have collaborated on writing with Alice Winocour. How did you meet?
At FEMIS. I greatly appreciate his sensitivity, his talent, his attention to the manifestations of life in the small daily details. In his writings on narratology, Gérard Genette explains that there are three types of story. A story that we know and that we tell to someone who knows it. A story we know that we tell to someone who doesn’t know it. And a story that we don’t know, that we tell to someone who doesn’t know it either. I arrived in France for my studies, towards the end of the 90s, just after the student demonstrations discussed Lost country and which were for me a sort of trigger so that in a certain way I could revolutionize myself. It was at that moment that I understood my need to share this story that I carried within me with a French audience. Because this is the country in which I was going to settle and where I wanted to make connections. With Alice, in Lost country as in Ordinary people, I therefore tell, to use Genette’s terms, a story that I know to someone who does not know it. And she gives me that look of the first spectator. The one who allows me to realize what is understandable or not and helps me to articulate the story, to clarify it.
How do you work together?
I write in Serbian, I translate into French then I have him read it. And, based on his feedback, I work again in Serbian because everything that happens in this film is inseparable from my childhood memories and feelings. So I need to go through the Serbian language and go back and forth with French. And Alice helps me build drama and meaning.
How did you construct the visual atmosphere of the film with another Frenchwoman, Sarah Blum?
Much has been said about Bergman and his collaboration Sven Niqquiyst. There is a very beautiful text by Bergman where he tells how the two of them could spend days on the island of Fårö observing and naming the different lights. With Sarah, we followed the same precept: observing the different atmospheres of Belgrade. I don’t like artificial lighting in my films. I have more of a documentary approach to fiction. I always start from reality. And I also wanted to work with Sarah when I saw her work on Alice Diop’s documentaries. On Lost country, we built the work plan according to the moments of light during the day that we wanted to capture. The story takes place over 5 days and I wanted each day to have its own luminous sonata and thus convey this feeling of time passing. I shoot on film. And I found in Sarah someone who mastered this technique and who had the courage to work without lighting. I wanted the film, like the character, to be devoured by darkness
Lost country lasts 1h40. Why this desire for a compact story, despite its multiple intimate but also political and historical adventures?
From the writing stage, I wanted a fairly condensed film. What Godard called small films or Deleuze the small form. Lost country takes place between the end of the Bosnian War and the start of the Kosovo War. A space during which my character will become aware of past crimes and feel the urgency of preventing future crimes. More broadly, this idea of the small Deleuzian form corresponds to my perception of history. In the 1990s, there were four successive wars in the former Yugoslavia. It was like a huge Hollywood action movie. But I observed this from the kitchen and a children’s bedroom. From the little signs. And then this small form also allows me to work within the framework of the reduced economy of the project. I don’t have the means for a big show even though we experienced a big historical show!
By Vladimir Perišić. With Jasna Djuricic, Jovan Ginic, Mindrag Jovanovic… Duration: 1h48. Released October 8, 2023
