“Il y a un bateau”: Depth Two and The Load

Glavonić’s film depictions of the concealed massacre of Kosovo Albanians in 1999 are a homage to the noble idea of political cinema: in particular, to its fragile idea of the need to understand the processes of remembrance, which, in today’s post-Yugoslav political reality, hits the walls of ever stronger historical revisionism and the institutionalized processes of amnesia. The skilful play on the absence/presence pair in Depth Two (Dubina dva, 2016) and The Load (Teret, 2018) is a slap in the face of the post-genocide state of the Balkan and European (political) establishment: it is its distorted mirror image. With the various ways of muting and silencing and with its emphases, the narrative world of Glavonić’s last two films also includes many questions of contemporary cinema and its status in the uncertain geopolitical situation that we have witnessed in the area of former Yugoslavia and the wider European political space.

The integral version of this article can be found in the printed KINO!