Das Jahr nach Dayton 1997

The year after the end of the war, in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Nikolaus Geyrhalter questions Serbs, Bosnians and Croats on the consequences of the conflict, following them if necessary as they move from lodging to lodging. The use of depth of field, which sets the protagonists in the foreground of a landscape unfolding around them, in itself sums up the filmmaker’s approach: taking the opposite stance to the one-dimensional televised image, for which war is above all a news item, he shows both the more particular – the upheaval of human lives – and the more general – what happens once the conflict has officially ended. As one of them says: “It’s easy to light a fire. It’s putting it out that takes time.”