Was bleibt

In 2008 und 2009, Clarissa Thieme travelled through Bosnia-Herzegovina and set up her camera in places where war crimes had taken place in the 1990s. Those trips resulted in the short film Was bleibt | Sta ostaje | What remains. Now she returns to these locations and sets up her camera in precisely the same spots, with two women carrying a still from the first film into the frame as a kind of performative act. It’s a process as simple as it is clever, revealing similarities and differences between 2009 and 2019. A ruin has been torn down, a house has been given a new coat of paint, the place where a herd of sheep once huddled is now covered with scrub. At the same time, the poster arouses the curiosity of passers-by; they engage the director and her associates in conversation. Furthermore, this mini-performance starts up a kind of game: What can be seen when an image from the past blocks one’s view of the present, or only allows it to be glimpsed from the margins? Almost in passing, the film expands into a reflection on the question of what visible and invisible traces does a violent past leave behind on a landscape and in people’s memories. (Berlinale)