The short films comprising Liffe’s Europe in Short Section all examine different issues of present-day society. One of the films screened on 14 November at the Kinodvor Cinema was Me Montage, third part in the triptych A Journey into Zero Space by Dawood Hilmandi, treading the fine line between autobiographic fiction and experimental cinematic essay. Discussing a topic that is highly relevant to the present day, Me Montage – a mental journey through memories and confrontations with the sense of being uprooted – deals with migration. An immigrant himself, Hilmandi joined the hosts Peter Cerovšek and Matevž Jerman from the Society for Short Film Promotion Kraken for a short Q&A session. Living first in Afghanistan in then in Iran, the director left his large family at the early age of thirteen, and moved to Amsterdam. His main reason for leaving was his father’s new-found religious fervour, which curbed Hilmandi’s personal freedom. He chose to juxtapose freedom and the system (which he understands as an authoritarian rule of a religious state) in reaction to the persecution of the Hazara people, an ethnic group in Afghanistan to which he belongs. Hilmandi sees history as a narrative, and cinema as “a methodology employed with a view to distinguishing between authority and freedom” and as “an attempt at surpassing the systematic narrative structure of Hollywood cinema.”
The themes that run through his work are “human life,” which he became preoccupied with after having survived the Kabul terrorist attack, and “fascination with the human brain.” Drawing on his past, Dawood Hilmandi investigates memory; our ability to remember, how to retrieve memories from our “mental archive” and fit the pieces together to make a coherent whole. Overwhelmed by thoughts, that is, “too many problems and concepts,” he seeks to single out only some core concepts from his personal archive: in seamlessly incorporating these concepts, Hilmandi’s works offer the viewer an insight into a personal space of reflection.
Written by Nataša Šušteršič
Photo Iztok Dimc