Sheffield DocFest 2024: At the Door of the House Who Will Come Knocking | Review
In Sheffield DocFest 2024 top award winner, Maja Novaković tenderly portrays the solitary life of Emin, an elderly man trapped in time and tormented by his past, set against the stark beauty of Bosnia’s mountains.
Emin lives reclusively in a hamlet nestled at the foot of the mountains in Bosnia and Herzegovina. For this octogenarian, time seems to have stood still as he is endlessly tormented by the wounds of his past. In At the Door of the House Who Will Come Knocking (original title: Ko će pokucati na vrata mog doma), which had its world premiere at Sheffield DocFest 2024 where it swept the Oscar-qualifying Grand Jury Award for the International Competition, director Maja Novaković gracefully and modestly portrays Emin in all his complexity.
In the heart of a harsh winter, Emin’s daily routine is reduced to a few repetitive tasks: struggling out of bed, putting on his boots and sweater, lighting the stove to warm his cramped and spartan home, and then heading out to tend to his animals. Among them is his horse, which he leads to a frozen trough for a drink before guiding it up the mountain, shielded from the bitter cold by a blanket with traditional patterns. The monotony of his existence is only occasionally broken by his neighbor’s brief visits to borrow wood or passing by on the nearby path, always refusing to venture into Emin’s abode and quickly ending any attempt at conversation.
Unable to express his emotions, Emin broods over the scars of his past. The director uses fiction to represent the melancholic thoughts of the old man. These sequences, increasingly interwoven with direct cinema, are embodied by a little boy who sometimes wanders through the woods and at other times sings a lullaby to a sleeping Emin. Sitting atop a snow-covered mountain, Emin imagines springtime landscapes, as if envisioning better days after the turmoil.
In At the Door of the House Who Will Come Knocking, Maja Novaković delivers an enlightening debut feature that reflects on the passage of time and the marks it leaves on us. This work encourages us to look beyond appearances to glimpse the complexity of the inner self, emphasized by the play of light and the non-direct approach to the subject, captured through reflections on the water’s surface or in a mirror.
Finally, let’s take advantage of the filmmaker’s nod with the title of their film to remember French poet Pierre Albert-Birot and these few verses:
“At the door of the house who will come knocking?
An open door, we enter
A closed door, a den
The world pulse beats beyond my door”
Pierre Albert Birot, Les Amusements Naturels.
Explore our coverage of Sheffield DocFest 2024 here.
