Tea Tupajić:
Darkness There and Nothing More

One summer, many summers after the war, a young woman from Bosnia approaches two Dutchbat veterans (with the symbolic names of Harm and Frank) with a curious proposal.

She invited them to spend one night with her in a desolate theater, from sunset to sunrise. This night would be the first time they met. She said to them that, being a director, she would like to capture the night on film. The only witnesses of their night together would be one cameraman and one sound recordist, filming the entire night without a break.

Dutchbat was a Dutch battalion under the command of the United Nations, during the Bosnian war of the 1990s. Its mandate was historically tied to the question of indirect responsibility for the Srebrenica genocide, in which Bosnian Serb forces killed nearly 8,400 Bosnian Muslim men and boys. . In Tea’s childhood memory, they represent the ones who have left, and this was how she opened the film.

Harm seemed to be the fantasy savior she had been waiting for. Her story as a child of war was intertwined with his guilt over a boy he had not been able to save. Instead, to correct what he saw as the failure of his life, he desperately tried to save Tea that night. The night with Frank was the hottest one of the summer. Diagnosed with terminal cancer, he brought the gift of honesty of a man with nothing left to lose.

When dawn came, it brought no resolutions, no love, and no glory. It was as real and red as the wound between them.