78 Days

After their father is conscripted during the 1999 NATO bombing of Serbia, three sisters begin a Hi8 video diary in their countryside home. They film each other putting on make-up, picking cherries, playing party games, getting into fights and helping their mother cook. This fragile, intimate world is perhaps their only shelter from the reality of bombings, sirens and war.

In her debut feature 78 Days, Emilija Gašić fashions a touching coming-of-age tale throbbing with life. Set in the first half of 1999, when the NATO started attacking Serbia during the Kosovo war, Gašić’s film zeroes in on a particular time and place to chart the limits of the children’s carefree existence. The narrative adeptly interweaves the perspectives of the three sisters, each one at a different point on the road to adulthood, producing a composite picture of growing up during wartime.

Not only does 78 Days recreate the look, texture and poetics of home movies from the nineties with documentary accuracy, it is also attentive to the way cameras mediate the relationships between people. In observing the social dynamics of a domestic space with one shared camera, 78 Days functions equally as an insightful work of technological ethnography. 

– Srikanth Srinivasan

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