Twelve-year-old Mikal lives with his father Jason, mother Tonya and cat Smokey in cramped conditions in a run-down hotel room. So-called “flophouses” offer accommodation to all those who cannot escape the radical inequality of the US real estate market and are forced to lead their lives on the margins of society. The few square metres serve as bedroom, living room and kitchen, dishes are done in the bathtub. Nothing but a thin curtain separates Mikal’s “realm” from his parents’ bed, and the only escapes from the confines of his home are the lonely hotel corridors and the vending machine in the lobby. But their family life is put to the test not only by the precarious living conditions but also by his mother’s alcohol abuse.
Despite these difficult circumstances, moments of love, affection and dreaming shine through. It seems almost harmonious when, after a fierce argument, father and son kneel in front of the bathtub, washing a mountain of dishes and jokingly adopting the language of commands in a canteen kitchen. In her three-year observation, director Monica Strømdahl captures such ambivalences in fragile and intimate images whose immediacy is always palpable.

She left Serbia a long time ago and never looked back. But then Nataša Urban discovered her father’s hiking diary and began to connect his entries to the events of the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s. The 1999 total eclipse of the sun is the central motif, employed by Urban as a metaphor for the way a dark past remains part of the present.

Kitted out with analogue film equipment, the director travels back to find the stories of her family, intimate friends and acquaintances. She listens to memories of inconceivably cruel acts; she watches the wind blow through leaves of grass. Her father, a lean, grey-haired man, hikes through the forest, striding again through the places he once visited. Dreamlike scenes meet sober descriptions of almost unbearable atrocities. Urban skilfully combines 16 mm and Super 8 film with archive material to explore the blurred boundaries between the individual and the collective, the private and public spheres, the personal and the political, resulting in an enchantingly beautiful work of art, a poetic reflection on growing up during the war.