Much of this Serbian documentary uses a striking, mildly psychedelic technique: a super-slow dissolve between images that morph near-imperceptibly into the next. Cracks in rendered rural walls appear to shift and Balkan forest vegetation undergoes subtle mutations, as the film’s subject, nonagenarian Sofia Vujanovic, recalls her past in voiceover: one of Tito’s partisans, her wartime activities and subsequent deportation to Auschwitz. It’s as if an ineluctable force – history – is moving through the material world, warping and reshaping it.
These tectonics operate on human flesh too: Vujanovic’s Auschwitz tattoo has slipped down her forearm as the years have gone by. Purpose still weighting her words, she recounts her journey into activism: she was attracted to communism by progressive classmates in the countryside; cherrypicked as a cell leader during the second world war because being a woman allowed her to escape attention; and then sickened by taking her first life, an SS officer during a raid on a supply train. Vujanovic was then captured, tortured and shipped off into darkness in Poland, with Czechoslovak railwaymen taunting the prisoners en route: “Gas, gas!” She thought they were being sent to work at a gas-processing plant.
Interweaving these enigmatic shots with sequences of Vujanovic in her apartment, overlaying them with diary extracts and sigil-like illustrations, the film’s director, Marta Popivoda, lets history subtly press upon us. Her attempt to draw a line to present-day fascism is a little clumsy, though: Popivoda’s mention of moving to Berlin with her partner and co-writer Ana Vujanovic as a protest against growing Balkans homophobia and capitalism is featherweight in comparison with the pensioner’s life-or-death resistance. Ana Vujanovic is Sofia’s great-niece, so making the documentary personal is understandable – but as a pre-emptive warning to heed extremism in our time, it feels half-baked.
The older woman’s experiences – and Popivoda’s unflustered conveyance of them – speak louder. Where our attention is drawn initially to the beguiling images, it finally settles on the constant of Vujanovic’s voice; testimony to the strength of idealism and human determination to transmit through the decades.
Landscapes of Resistance is available on True Story on 2 February.
