In my viewpoint, to embark on a rescue mission attempt of a desperately disparate “you” in “work duty” means to know yourself well enough outside of your professional life to be able to recognize and answer your own call for help. Should expressing the need for support only look like staring in the mirror at the end of (or before the start of) a difficult day while saying nothing, often times it is only you alone that can even begin to see it and consequently start reaching out for the necessary aid. The “you” gets noticed, acknowledged and almost saved in different ways amongst the finalists of the 13th Balkans Beyond Borders Short Film Festival Competition WORK DUTY section, the reflection’s honest piercing look never once ignored.
Personalities acting up out of a mix of conscious and subconscious resistance to a monotonous workplace environment are the first to be brought into the spotlight. Обичнata Ели / The Ordinary Eli (2022) is a woman with 25 years of experience working as a security guard in an art museum. Her inner self (or, as previously established, the reflection) demands a change. Eli (Izabela Novotni) has recognized it in full, admitting to having longed for a wonderlust kind of freedom for a while. In the practical sense, moving towards it depends on quitting the current job and embracing whatever beginning anew might entail for her. With the ideal rundown of handing in her resignation already learned by heart the “little” left to happen though, as it is internalized, is having her comfort zone completely shatter while the uncertainty that lies ahead takes over, such that, taking the crucial next step gets postponed indefinitely. One quickly senses that the decision has been put off for quite some time. Lavinija Sofronievska directs with equal amounts of care and subtle irony the hesitation between Eli’s desires safely expressed at home while guarded at work until it reveals the enmeshment between her genuinely escapist nature and another habitually protective side against the unknowns of change; how Eli’s projections about an ideal outcome have become affected by working a full time job in a museum of contemporary art creatively complementing the nature of her indecision.
A similar daydream of escaping in nature provides a relaxing but short distraction for Nina (Ivona Baković), a med student interning at a Covid Call Center in Sarajevo. After this moment is when director Mirela Salihović’s plot point is set in motion in the form of a call perceived by the protagonist as stranger than usual and as a sort of test of compassion. The communication that follows between Nina and Almir (Harun Ćehović) patiently establishes healing closeness at a distance which, by virtue of the 7th art, also materializes as a shared daydreaming experience. Ispričaj Mi Nešto Lijepo / Tell Me Something Nice’s (2021) quotidian exchange of words and mentally imagined connectedness, although more directly drawn out of awareness about the impact of the pandemic on mental health also touches on the, just as important and not to be taken for granted, potentially miraculous role of corrective experiences.
Dimitra Kondylatou’s LUXENIA (2021), on the other hand, reflects, as a whole, a universe of slow burn self-disclosure about the transparent façade of language (and culture) commodification intrinsic to the hospitality industry. Overlaying three hotel workers’ routine tasks a radio show broadcasts a general overview of how the pineapple, indigenous to South America goes from Columbus’ obtained prize to a symbol of hospitality and another commonly imported commodity. LUXENIA leaves any possible visually constructed identifiers somehow analogous to the sentiment left by the exotic fruit’s tale to speak for themselves. At one point, silence interrupts the suppressed, preconditioned flow of things. The ideal arrangement for chaos to restore a bit of necessary normalcy into the quotidian is established. There are many possible variants to approaching the retrieval of a disparate “you” in “work duty” and LUXENIA does a great job of breaking down enough of the average viewer’s expectations of how one can cinematically loosen the chokehold of, in this case, some of the superficial grapples of conformity.
At the end of the day though, or at the end of the shift, an individual still has a little bit of leverage in not completely submitting their entire selfhood to a business-friendly persona. The same cannot be concluded when addressing bigger issues of political concern about someone’s native land. Pinpointing one facet that feels closest to home out of this vast area worthy of discussion, director Aram Dildar smartly reflects upon how familiar geography can be found stripped of memory in Navnîsan / The Address (2022). Unless one pays close attention to the short film’s opening couple of minutes, the disorienting experience of Edib (Ahmet Akman), a teacher trying to find his newly appointed workplace using the name provided by the institutions in charge of making these decisions, might end up also reaching the viewer. Failing to arrive at his destination while traversing, what feels like, the entirety of his village’s surrounding grounds and asking for directions from people who know the landscape by heart, the protagonist’s futile search is significant through mirroring, as the director himself puts it, “the story of someone lost in their own geography”. The Address cinematically translates one possible pathway into the very personal experience of displacement felt by those belonging to territories subjected to the practice of settlement renaming in Turkey.
In closing, Yara / The Hurt (2020) urging a woman to fatally harm her abuser thus taking justice into her own hands gets shared in confidence with Doctor Bahar (Tülin Özen), affecting the usual workings of the medical physician’s moral compass after getting assigned to do a home visit with the purpose of filling out a death certificate. The Hurt leaves enough of a well-developed impression upon the viewer, capable of placing us in the position of questioning our own sense of morality alongside Dr.Bahar and bride Nur (Nihal Yalçın). Managing to believably direct the subtext of the two women’s dynamic sparked by the bride’s confession while the peculiar atmosphere of mourning helps conceal any possible evidence of unethical behavior on both parts contributes to what gives substance to Onur Güler’s short film. The unforeseen mud splash on the windshield of the doctor’s car as she prepares to drive off while still holding eye contact with Nur is the detail giving The Hurt its appropriateartfully cinematic sign off.