The short film “Room Without a View” (14 minutes) has a special place in my heart. It is the first of films directed by my sister, Rada Šešić, a filmmaker and film critic, that was produced in the Netherlands. It is an autobiographical story of a cineast who fled from the war in her homeland and finds herself facing turmoil of a different kind. In a poetic narrative it thematizes one’s arrival in a new world and the interplay between new experiences of solitude and memories of the life left behind.
There is a part of the film, an unusual scene at the table placed in a lake, which always moves me in a very personal and intimate way. I feature in that scene surrounded by people from my homeland who happened to be still in my vicinity and who have deeply marked my life, people such as my sister Rada and my husband Nenad, as well as those whom we met after arriving in the Netherlands and who became inseparable part of my life ever since.
In some scenes our voices are heard reading letters to be sent to our dearest ones or uttering broken sentences in rare and precious moments of short phone conversations. In the closing sequence I hear myself playing guitar and singing “Emina”, that famous and sad song with lyrics written by a great poet Aleksa Šantić, loved and sung all around the Balkans. There, I always have that intense, albeit brief glance of my true self – as it once was and as I hope shall always remain to be, beyond the reach of transience.
The film “Room Without a View” has been screened twice at the IDFA Festival in Amsterdam (1997 & 2021) as well as at many other festivals in Europe. It is archived in the collection of the Eye Film Museum in Amsterdam.