Film Archive

Jahr

Land (Film Archive)

Doc Alliance Award 2022
Filmstill The Eclipse
The Eclipse
Nataša Urban
When Nataša Urban finds her father’s hiking diary, she takes it as a starting point for an enchantingly beautiful film about how she grew up during the Yugoslav War.
Filmstill The Eclipse

The Eclipse

Formørkelsen
Nataša Urban
Doc Alliance Award 2022
Documentary Film
Norway
2022
110 minutes
Serbian
Subtitles: 
English

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.
Lina Dinkla

Credits DOK Leipzig Logo

Director
Nataša Urban
Script
Nataša Urban
Cinematographer
Ivan Marković
Editor
Jelena Maksimović
Producer
Ingvil Giske
Sound Design
Svenn Jakobsen
Score
Bill Gould, Jared Blum
World Sales
Zorana Vuckovic