A three-minute detective story. A researcher is handed a flashlight and a quarter of an hour in an unlit Bosnian archive, and finds a folder that had been sitting in the dark for sixty-five years. We built the entire film out of documents, because the archive is the subject.
One September afternoon in 2006, in a basement depot in Bosnia-Herzegovina, an archivist gave a foreign researcher fifteen minutes. Most of the bulbs had burned out, so she handed him a flashlight, sent him down a dark row of shelves, and said: God save me if someone found out I let a foreigner down here. Then she went for coffee with her colleagues.
He had been working on the question that brought him there for years. He had fifteen minutes. By the light of the flashlight he strained to read the handwriting on filthy stacks of blue folders that no one had catalogued, and then his eyes stopped on four words: Sites of Mass Executions.
Inside was the record of Kulen Vakuf, a multi-ethnic town where in the summer of 1941 many of the residents were both killers and victims, in a series of massacres in which thousands were killed. The record had lain in the dark, uncatalogued, for sixty-five years. It is a detective story in which the evidence was never hidden. No one had simply turned a light on it.
A flashlight beam falls on a folder, and on four handwritten words. The folder had sat uncatalogued since 1945. The whole film turns on this moment: a man reading a label.
In the film the town is made of paper, of the same documents that record it. When it is set alight it burns the way paper burns, and you see how fragile the record itself is. No narration needs to explain it. You see it.
What becomes of a town’s history when it lies uncatalogued in a dark basement for sixty-five years?
The archive we built for the film is not its setting but its material. Every figure and every surface is made from the archive’s documents. The corridors are stacked paper. The researcher is covered in handwriting. The archivist’s coat is patterned document stock and her dress is lined with a page of music. The massacre in the street is a paper crowd on a paper street.
What survived of the violent moments in Kulen Vakuf is the record. So a film about that record should be made of the record, of the archive’s own material, and of nothing else.
It starts from the researcher himself — Max Bergholz, photographed speaking.
The turnaround built for production, in four views. Face, hands, hoodie and jeans are all rendered in document paper.
At close range the construction is explicit: printed and handwritten lines run across the fingers and the forehead.
No photograph of her exists, so the character is a construction rather than a portrait — the one figure in the film who decides what may be seen, and for how long.
Her coat is patterned document stock; the lining of her dress is a page of musical notation. She is assembled from the holdings she controls.
Max Bergholz is a Professor of History at Concordia University in Montreal. The folders he found became Violence as a Generative Force: Identity, Nationalism, and Memory in a Balkan Community (Cornell University Press, 2016), which won the American Historical Association’s Herbert Baxter Adams Prize and the Laura Shannon Prize in Contemporary European Studies. The Dan David Prize selection committee lauded his “original and fundamental insight into the history of intercommunal violence and warfare in the Balkan and his use of microhistory to decode a specific historical situation in ways that shed light on comparable situations around the world.”
Each year the Foundation chooses, with the laureate, the subject of the film they are honoured for, and we turn it into script, image and motion. The laureate sees it for the first time on the evening of the prize — on the big screen, in a room full of people who have come to honour them. Afterwards the films go out on social media, YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn and more, and on the Foundation’s own site, beside the committee’s reasoning and the laureate’s interview, and some laureates carry them into their own classrooms, to show what it is they work on.