Word of author

Documentary theater, because it is simultaneously exciting and disturbing. Documentary shows I’ve watched over the last few years have especially influenced me (plays of Rimini Protokoll, Sanja Mitrovic, Illay den Boer, to some extent, Need Company…). They are specifically true theater – in addition to viewing and listening to events that actually occurred, the authors and artists generally explore parts of their biographies that are difficult to face. For me, that is the most exciting thing about theatre – willingness to face your own darkness, fears, prejudices, hatred and your own seeds of evil. Because we all have it, whether we are conscious of it or not. And that is why theater should be socially responsible. In a certain sense – confronting, first individually, so that we could talk about the collective.

Intimate history. I was just interested in it. For eight people we watch on the scene, it’s necessarily marked by extreme social and political circumstances. But still I was interested in the intimate history. Well, historical facts are there (although conflicting parties are treated differently), but what happened to you? And you? How did you see it then, when you were five, ten or thirteen years old? I knew that merging people from Sarajevo, Belgrade and Pristina and dealing with their biographies is necessary to get the political context. I wanted it to be present throughout the show just as much as it marked the lives of eight children or adolescents at the time. From their perspective, in that moment, without comment from today. Those twenty years are the most of the life or whole life for this team of authors. They left irreversible consequences and innumerable scars. But it is also our life, the only reality that we knew growing up. And these individual experiences, look at the world of children growing up in extreme circumstances, this is what interests me.

The flow of the process was difficult to predict. The methodology of work existed, but the material for the show is eight human lives, and there are so many directions in which they can turn. The selection of material was a painful process, because it really could be made into several plays. For me personally, the most complicated was dramatization and aestheticization of the events, while also staying true to facts. Nothing in this show is fiction. The dialogues, which were true, came out from suggested material for improvisation – diary entries, letters or everyday lives of families. It was important to keep the authenticity simultaneously with speaking theatrical language so that everything could receive universal form. Personal material of the actors was turned into stage tasks, and the distance they had to achieve was very significant. It is important not to impose your own attitude, emotion or comment to the audience. Leave space for them to conclude. It sounds easier than it is, when you talk about the events that happened to you. You need to be objective within your own subjectivity.

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gtyH1neJgh4