IDFA in Groningen 2024
The landscape and the fury
Cinema Forum Groningen
Nieuwe Markt 1, 9712KN GroningenHypnotic film about a Bosnian border town from which asylum seekers try to enter the European Union. Meanwhile, the locals themselves are still struggling with the consequences of the fighting that took place there three decades earlier.
In the pitch darkness, panting sounds. Hasty footsteps on leaves, in the distance dogs bark. Men in yellow suits cordon off stretches of ground with ribbons. Groups of people make their way in the pouring rain. A dilapidated schoolhouse full of abandoned shoes and medicine strips, a peeling alphabet poster still on the wall. Nicole Vögele begins The Landscape and the Fury, winner of the Grand Jury Prize of documentary festival Visions du Réel, with a series of such impressions, but slowly a story unfolds.
Two parallel worlds meet in this border region in Bosnia: that of asylum seekers trying to get to Croatia and that of local residents. Through their own experiences of war suffering, they can imagine all too well what the passing migrants have gone through. Vögele takes the time to let the images do their work. As a result, you get sucked into the swaying rhythms of this rural hamlet, while the menacing soundtrack and testimonies of wars - far away and at the same time still so close - meanwhile cause a stomach ache.