A trip to the beach expands to a family observation over two generations. This captivating minimalist stretching exercise does not need much: black and white and the deep blue of the sea.
Blue is a story in which time stretches. A mother and a daughter are trying to find their place after the father leaves. They spend time idly on a metaphorical empty beach. They fight their uncertainty and longing. The image of the sea comes back rhythmically. It is a promise of freedom but also a scary different world, far from the warm sand.
A box of film material from Tito-era Yugoslavia becomes a narrative engine. With dry wit and philosophical verve, this essay burrows through family and contemporary history.
The sixties and the seventies of the 20th century in our former country, a country that ceased to be. A young family moves from a rural environment to a small Slovenian town, where factories are being built and the need for a workforce is increasing. The brothers are growing up in that shaky but magical in-between, soaked in the everyday rhythms of the community, infused with the ideology of the time. Then, it happens: the sudden spectrum of film; the mystique of time itself.
The breasts are in place, the feathers are smoothed, off to the date! Her daughter does not comprehend the ritual of desire yet … Erotically crude, with pointed beaks in the conflicts.
Abkhazia, a place of memory and at the same time a blind spot for the director. Almost impossible to enter from Georgia, she chooses an associative and personal approach to the split-off territory.
An abandoned house opens the door to revisit the past by bringing to life a unique, nearly destroyed image archive from the unrecognised territory on the border of the Black Sea: Abkhazia. A place normally inaccessible for Georgians because of the ethnic conflict that happened between Georgia and Abkhazia back in 1993. Combining voice, archive and recent footage, the film examines a lost and split identity stuck between the margins. The audio-visual fragments of this archive are intricately woven together to create a personal and political biography which recalls the complicated and controversial historical past of Georgian-Abkhaz relationships.
The highly personal narration delves into the complexities of nationalism and identity in times of war and global displacement. Ultimately, these reflections on recent history become a potential manual for what can come next, once the wars are over.
The idyllic Swiss family estate, Sonnenhof, no longer feels like home to Dijana, now that her daughter has moved away. She slowly begins to look beyond its borders and seeks comfort in the fragments of the previous life she left behind in former Yugoslavia.
DOK Industry is realised with the support of Creative Europe MEDIA Programme of the European Union, the Mitteldeutsche Medienförderung (MDM) and the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media upon a Decision of the German Bundestag.