THE BIRTHDAY PARTY

Director's Statement

IL COMPLEANNO DI ENRICO is a film about memory and how we remember things. The events in the film are autobiographical and I tried to film them faithfully. However, I realised that the only way to do this was to stage those particular distortions typical of memories: the accentuation of seemingly unimportant details, the landscapes and places filtered through emotion, a certain perturbing atmosphere that is not subject to the laws of logic. It is a film about being a child, about fascination at other people's homes, about strict fathers and alcoholic fathers, about grandmothers who disappear into the woods and mothers who have to scream to be heard. Shooting this film was for me like finding an old elementary school notebook or reading a postcard from a bygone era, caught in a moment of transition: the last days of the millennium, between the end of the war in Yugoslavia and the beginning of a world of terror and uncertainty symbolized, in the story, by the Millennium Bug. To tell the story, I chose to point the camera, once again, at the landscape of my native country, a place at once familiar to me and charged with horror.