WILD FLOWERS

DIVLJE CVIJEĆE

Croatia, Spain | 2023 | 11 min

The cursor moves about a digital map, getting far from the coast to cross an apparently endless sea of an artificial blue. The mouse is feverishly looking for a landing place; its anxious movements evoke the uncertainty of a sudden escape, the displacement of exile. Thirty years after this escape, film director Karla Crnčević goes back to the VHS footage filmed by her father on the day of the return to their village in Croatia at the end of the war. It’s the only images he has ever filmed; they carry the irresistible necessity to fix that moment for the future. The voice of the father, on the phone with the filmmaker in the present, remembers that shoot, but we soon find out that his words gradually deviate from what we see: in this gap between memory and archive, the film is constructed like an essay on memory as a process of constant recreation of the past in the present, a wild flower growing on the ruins of yesteryear. (m.m.)

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