Slowly Nowhere

The characters of Damir Čučić’s Slowly Nowhere, an oneiric experimental love story set 10 years from now, may be living in the future, but they are nostalgists strangely unmoored from their time. Oleg is a film student who leads a spartan life surrounded by analogue technology. A librarian during daytime, Marta is an avant-garde novelist who works with alternate subjectivities. Narrated from each of their perspectives, Čučić’s film recounts a romance that never ceases to take new shape.

Like Oleg’s diploma project, Slowly Nowhere beguilingly overlays formalist experimentation with personal experience, interspersing everyday scenes of the protagonists at work with eclectic passages of visual abstraction: pulsating heatmaps, strobing CRT patterns, digital smudges, found-footage manipulation and light patterns on varied textures. Even bodies making love are sublimated into sensual silhouettes against fluorescent colour fields.

Just as it freely slides between documentary and fiction, the film refuses to make a distinction between reality and fantasy, with the existence of any given character being contingent on another’s imagination. Oleg creates his work in bouts of drug-fuelled haze, while Marta writes in a male voice and reads out raunchy texts over the phone to an unseen interlocutor. Slowly Nowhere takes the viewer on a hypnotic journey into the malleability of identity and desire.

– Srikanth Srinivasan