For audience members, some films—especially the type screened at international film festivals—can be a test of endurance. The reasons may vary: the film may be inaccessibly experimental, repulsively pretentious, two hours too long, or simply really bad. These are not the reasons that make “As If I Am Not There” difficult to watch. This Irish/Swedish/Macedonian co-production is a truly heart-wrenching experience, and one that, despite its brief running time, becomes increasingly challenging to sit through.
For her debut feature, Irish director Juanita Wilson presents an uncompromising look at the horrors of war and the terrifying capacity for cruelty that possesses men unleashed from the constraints of civilization. Based on the notoriously graphic book “S: A Novel About the Balkans” by Croatian journalist Slavenka Drakulić, “As If I Am Not There” tells the story of Samira, a young Muslim woman from Sarajevo, who travels to a remote area to substitute for a local school teacher who has disappeared. Before Samira has a chance to settle in, militants arrive, storming the village and dragging its residents out of their homes at gunpoint. The men of the village are lined up and shot, the women and children herded onto buses and Samira soon finds herself in a prison camp—scared, confused and seemingly doomed to share the same fate as the women of the village, despite not being one of them.
Samira and the other women of the camp soon learn that a daily existence under the control of the Serbian soldiers (although they are never identified as such) can be adequately summed up by one tragically inescapable truth: systematic rape. Wilson doesn’t shy away from depicting these heinous acts, nor does she sensationalize them—Samira’s initiation into the soldiers’ sordid rituals is documented in one long, brutal scene with no music, and only a few simple, yet all the more effective, camera angles. Wilson is similarly unflinching when it comes to the countless other acts of monstrosity committed by the mostly drunk soldiers, including beating the female prisoners, relentless humiliation and most disturbing of all, raping the children.
What separates “As If I Am Not There” from other wartime dramas that seem to wallow in their own misery in the hopes of being labeled by critics as “powerful” cinema, is its simplicity. Wilson refrains from the stylistic flourishes and elaborate camera setups that seem to plague new directors looking to distinguish themselves; instead, she relies solely on what’s directly in front of the camera. Fortunately for her, that translates to an endearing and heartbreaking performance by newcomer Natasha Petrovic, who makes one of the boldest onscreen debuts in recent memory. With her understated beauty and wide-eyed innocence, Petrovic is a perfect choice for the role of Samira, chronicling the stages of her character’s tragic deterioration with an arresting intensity that belies her relative lack of onscreen experience.
The audience is never told much about Samira; ironically, this makes her a much more realistic character. Wilson resists giving Samira traits that mark her as an individual personality and believable fictional creation, presumably out of a desire to have her instead serve as a symbol for all the women who have suffered similar atrocities as a consequence of war.
This attitude extends to the rest of the cast. Characterizations are stark, not out of any laziness on the filmmakers’ part, but out of a necessity to stay true to the extreme situations depicted. The prison camp, a desolated hangar in the middle of a vast and featureless field, is a world of its own, one where the past lives of its current inhabitants amounts to absolutely nothing. Samira’s being a substitute teacher from Sarajevo means just as little as the framed photo of a young boy that the Serbian commander—the man in charge of the other guards—keeps on his desk. However, the rules of war and, subsequently, those of the prison camp relegate the two individuals to far simpler, crueler roles of “prisoner” and “captor,” both victims in their own ways.
“As If I Am Not There” benefits strongly from its director’s unsentimental approach. Wilson does not attempt to manipulate the audience’s feelings by resorting to any of the familiar clichés (i.e. soaring musical cues, passionate and teary-eyed speeches), and instead insists on taking her characters, and the audience, on an altogether darker path, one that asks, “How far would you go in order to survive?”
Unfortunately, the film does falter in its final minutes, as another dimension of Samira’s suffering is introduced only to be quickly and superficially examined. What could have been a haunting closing, an extra twist of the blade which Wilson so effectively sinks into her audience, instead comes across as being merely downbeat. However, this misstep is not enough to significantly detract from the film’s overall impact. Exhausting and beautifully acted, “As If I Am Not There” may not be a perfect film, but it is an important document, one that should be seen just to be remembered.
