Berlinale 2024: Afterwar (Panorama Dokumente) | Review
Gut punch docufiction Afterwar breaks the fourth wall, and our hearts. Brigitte Stærmose plunges into the aftermath of the Kosovo War through the eyes of children turned adults, offering a bold and visceral cinematic narrative, bridging reality and fiction to deliver a powerful testament to human resilience.
Premiering in the Panorama Dokumente strand of the 74th Berlinale, Afterwar, directed by seasoned Danish filmmaker Birgitte Stærmose, delves deeply into the aftermath of the Kosovo War (1998-1999), particularly through the eyes of children who have grown into adults. With a bold cinematic approach and close collaboration with the characters, Stærmose delivers a visceral and poetic narrative about the daily struggle for survival and the search for dignity in a country torn apart by war.
From the very first archival footage, the viewer is confronted with the desolation of post-conflict Kosovo. The ruins, devastated landscapes, and hungry children selling peanuts and cigarettes to survive bear witness to the devastating impact of the war on the population. Over the fifteen years spanned by the filming, these children grow up, suddenly becoming adults, yet their traumatic past continues to haunt their present, creating a haunting continuity between past, present, and future, presented as the three chapters of the film.
The uniqueness and strength of the film lie in its surprising and audacious approach, regularly breaking the fourth wall, allowing the characters to address the audience directly and share their stories and traumas with heartbreaking sincerity. In scenes from their daily lives, the characters suddenly look at us and confide in whispers. The camera isolates them so that they can deliver what weighs on their hearts daily. Their traumas are not just a thing of the past; they are still vivid and accompany them at every moment of their lives. As adults, they are haunted by these unbearable memories of war. Paradoxically, their whispers have the effect of the most powerful of cries and convey the intensity of their pain and sometimes their despair. They whisper because what they are talking about is too big, too strong. The fact that they whisper also metaphorically represents the fact that they dare not awaken this immensely painful past, avoid bringing it back from the depths into their daily present lives, as much as they can, as if there were a code of silence in society or, at least, a shared sentiment that one must move forward and leave the past behind. In this configuration, at least, their words send shivers down our spines.
Ultimately, Afterwar is like an artistic performance. The actors/characters bring their baggage, their trauma, their history, and the filmmaker directs them, or rather prepares a stage for them to express themselves. This film is truly the result of a meeting between these characters and a filmmaker. It’s a kind of docu-fiction that blurs the genres, in which the direction is present but serves to allow the real to emerge; it’s packaging for confidences, testimonials. Through this astonishing and innovative approach, the director provides a means of expression for these young people. With this film, it’s as if she gives them a blank sheet of paper and pencils and asks them to draw. She allows them to express themselves and speak out. One can feel that it is a collaborative project. The film is there to give these characters a vehicle, a tool, and a setting to accompany them and give them a voice. The film becomes an act of resilience and reclaiming the voices of these individuals, while offering the audience a gripping and immensely moving experience.
The co-construction process is all the more interesting and relevant because it’s a way to break the potentially hierarchical relationship between the filmmaker and the characters. The film is not a way to look down on them and further degrade them – their lives already do that. On the contrary, this process of co-creation allows them to regain some of their dignity, to involve them in the project as co-creators rather than just as miserable subjects being filmed.
The editing, by Stefan Sundlöf and Anne Østerud, is also finely executed. The parallels between the scenes of the characters’ youth and their adult lives underline the persistence of the traumas of war, even years later. The lost, traumatized, and hungry children they once were are still there behind the adults. The film then delivers a clever mise en abyme: just as their childhood scars linger, so does the haunting shadow of the nation’s past persist in its present.
The sound work, with its unsettling echoes, contributes to creating an atmosphere of melancholy and bitterness, underlining the constant weight of the past on the present. Without overdoing it, without being too heavy, the music composed by Erik K Skodvin plays its role perfectly in underlining the continuity in the trajectory of these characters, from their childhood to today. Fifteen years later, the characters still evolve in the same atmosphere, in the same limbo, while they go through the same places and sometimes take the same poses in front of the camera. The film highlights the fatality that weighs on them, the bad dream in which they are plunged, which goes on forever and seems never to be able to end.
In conclusion, Afterwar is a fascinating and destabilizing work, as it breaks down the emotional barriers of the viewer by breaking the fourth wall. With her respect and esteem for her characters, with whom she achieves a meaningful and mastered collaboration, Stærmose signs a poignant and visceral story, which transcends the boundaries between reality and fiction to deliver a powerful message about the persistence of the traumas of war and human resilience in the face of adversity.
