Bojana Radulović

During a scorching summer, Ana, a young girl on the cusp of adulthood, seems to have the entire world crash and burn around her, as her father becomes more controlling, her mother more secretive and her grandmother passes away.

It’s like almost all is lost. Yet still they are here – abandoned bungalows, an artificial lake, dirty plastic bottles, lost donkeys and stray dogs, draining pipes running over fields of salt, deserted factories, statues of revolutionaries, concrete playgrounds covered with weeds, rotten fruit, folded T-shirts, pop songs, decades of forgetting, a single room with a blue tent inside. And it felt like a kiss.

The film director searches for Gorčin, the protagonist of his film, with the help of his friend Dragan. Their journey takes them to Gorčin’s ancestral village, where they get lost in isolated hamlets, transforming the quest into an allegorical journey into the unknown.

Artist Bojana Radulović visits her childhood home in Montenegro for the first time in 17 years. The traditional, low-set building is dilapidated, and the garden neglected. Inside, the view is obscured by the plastic sheets wrapped like semi-transparent veils around the furniture. From the house, Radulović looks in all four directions of her mental compass. To the east lies Bosnia, still licking its wounds from the Balkan war. The west represents NATO. To the north lies a new consumerist society and to the south, all the memories of former Yugoslavia. In a poetic cadence, Radulović uses images and words to explore what it means to be rootless despite having a home. She's caught between a past marked by war and a future that holds little promise of prosperity. The house that was once her safe haven is now at the mercy of international developments and political changes.