This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.
Privacy Overview
Strictly Necessary Cookies
Strictly Necessary Cookie should be enabled at all times so that we can save your preferences for cookie settings.
If you disable this cookie, we will not be able to save your preferences. This means that every time you visit this website you will need to enable or disable cookies again.
3rd Party Cookies
This website uses Google Analytics to collect anonymous information such as the number of visitors to the site, and the most popular pages.
Keeping this cookie enabled helps us to improve our website.
Please enable Strictly Necessary Cookies first so that we can save your preferences!
Director's Statement
IN FLOW OF WORDS is a short experimental film about the piercing experiences of three interpreters of the Yugoslavia Tribunal in The Hague and their position as a channel between speakers and listeners, witnesses and defendants, judges and attendees.
The interpreters I work with in IN FLOW OF WORDS are born and raised in former Yugoslavia and lived through the war in the 90’s. They find themselves in the surreal position of having their own memories and emotions confronted with the narratives from opposite sides of the conflict: those of the people accused of war crimes, and those of the victims with whom they can identify as countrymen.
The Tribunal, the courtroom and the fact-finding missions are rigorously designed sites defined by strict rules, rituals and costumes. Every participant has to play his part as neutrally and objectively as possible so that the conflict can be presented in the courtroom in a ‘linguistic’, controlled, civilised form. The interpreters have to align the erratic process of interpretation with the rules that apply in the arena of the Tribunal.
The film focuses on the contrast between the emotional and physical impact of the dramatic stories that the interpreters have to deal with on the one hand, and the controlled and neutral environment of the Tribunal and its missions in which these narratives get retold on the other.
In the interpretation process, the interpreters have to be simultaneously present and absent: to be visibly neutral yet as invisible as possible, to get close to those involved yet keep their distance, to speak out yet be silent. They have to deal with the contrast between their inner turmoil and what they are allowed to show on the outside. They find themselves in a position in which they are transformed into human machines.