Dom

 

“One is born twice: the first time into the world, the second in the gaze of the mother.”
 Honoré de Balzac 

There is a thin line in the poster of Dom. A line that evokes an umbilical cord, a thread stretched between two ends that do not coincide. It is not merely a graphic element: it is the very form of the film. A stroke that attempts to join what history has divided, yet remains suspended, unresolved, like a question that finds no recipient. 

Dom — a word that in Bosnian means “home,” but also “institution,” “orphanage” — is a film about an impossible return. Mirela, now in her forties, lives in Rimini: she has a partner, two children, a daily life patiently constructed. And yet something persists, like an underground echo. That thread, never entirely severed, draws her back to Sarajevo, to the Bjelave orphanage from which she was evacuated in 1992, when the siege transformed the city into a geography of survival. 

The Bosnian war — which erupted in the spring of 1992 following the dissolution of Yugoslavia and formally ended with the Dayton Accords in 1995 — is not reconstructed here as a chronicle, but as an ontological fracture. The siege of Sarajevo, the longest in modern history, is not only a historical event: it is the original condition of a fractured identity. Mirela’s childhood coincides with a city deprived of water, light, continuity. The evacuation to Italy, through a humanitarian convoy, saves her biologically but suspends her symbolically. 

The film weaves archival material of the besieged city with an intimate staging, compressed into the 4:3 format. The image never fully opens up: it clings to faces, to breaths, as if space were still under fire. This formal choice is not aestheticism, but an ethics of the gaze. Battistella approaches Mirela without colonizing her pain; he builds a dialogue that crosses on-screen and off-screen space, supported by a relational framework that both protects and exposes. Sound, music, and silences become an inner flow rather than commentary. 

The return to Sarajevo is only the first step. The trajectory extends toward her native village, in Republika Srpska, where Mirela seeks her birth certificate. It is an apparently bureaucratic gesture, but in truth an ontological one: to retrieve a document is to ask the world for legitimation. 

At the heart of the narrative lies the attempt to reconnect not only with her origins, but with her mother. Here the umbilical line of the poster becomes a dramatic figure. Mirela tries to contact her, to understand her absence, even to justify it. The mother, however, remains distant, resistant to encounter. 

The film resists the temptation to turn this distance into a single, clear-cut guilt. On the contrary, it suggests that war also produces mothers who are prevented from being mothers. In a context where daily survival was an ordeal, abandonment is not necessarily an act of will, but sometimes the outcome of material and psychic devastation. 

Mirela’s mother embodies a form of shame and impotence silently disseminated by the conflict. How does one sustain the gaze of someone who survived elsewhere? Her resistance to meeting can be read as an ultimate gesture of defense. In this sense, the film avoids the rhetoric of reconciliation. Not every cord can be retied; not every origin can be restored. 

And yet Dom is not a despairing work. If the line remains suspended, it is because the point of arrival shifts. Mirela discovers that origin does not necessarily coincide with the biological mother. The rebuilt orphanage, the rediscovered friends — Amela, Branko — and the city itself become an alternative fabric of belonging. “Home” is no longer only the place one comes from, but what one constructs by passing through it. 

The film thus moves between two positions: being a daughter and being a mother. Mirela looks at her children while attempting to look back. In this simultaneity lies the possibility of reappropriation. It is not about obtaining a definitive answer from her mother, but about interrupting the silent transmission of trauma. If the cord cannot be stitched back together, it can at least be named. 

On the thirtieth anniversary of the official end of the war, Dom resonates beyond the individual case. It recalls how Europe witnessed that siege with culpable slowness and how international law revealed fractures that continue to widen. Yet the film does not indulge in geopolitical discourse; it allows it to surface as a necessary backdrop, because every biography is traversed by History. 

In the end, the line on the poster finds no closure. It remains taut, like a graphic sign crossing the void. Perhaps this is the most honest image: not full reconciliation. Mirela discovers that her legitimacy does not entirely depend on the one who gave her birth. 

“One does not belong to a place, but to a story.”
Claudio Magris