Can't You See Them? - Repeat.

Summary

Sarajevo during the siege in 1992: A group of armed men walks along the banks of the river Miljacka. One man is led away, and the group crosses the river. The neighbouring Grbavica district is about to be taken by the Serbs. The footage was shot by a man from an apartment in an adjacent skyscraper without knowing who the armed men were. Are they Serbs, Bosniaks? His camera wobbles, searches, pursues and retreats.

The artist Clarissa Thieme finds the man who shot the film and has him once again recount how it happened. Using a motion tracking program, she performs a metadata analysis of the original clip and calculates the camera’s position and movement. She feeds this data into a motion control system that projects light onto a screen. Light that moves, changes direction, trembles. From the interplay between narration, documentary material and light projected onto a screen, a resonance corpus is created: a body full of fear and anxiety, a body injured in war. A body that now can be experienced. Memory becomes tangible and visible. The trauma ascends from the skyscraper onto the screen and reaches the audience.

Source: 69. Internationale Filmfestspiele Berlin (Catalogue)