A Film a Week - The Love Room / Ljubovnata soba

 previously published on Cineuropa

When the topic of prisons arises in both fiction films and documentaries alike, the focus usually falls somewhere inside the walls: inmates, guards, the management or the whole prison system. Filmmakers normally pay little attention to those who have stayed on the outside and whose loved ones are behind bars. But Suzana Dinevski’s The Love Room is one of the rare films that does, as it puts the wives of two inmates in the same prison, Idrizovo near Skopje, in the spotlight.

As a work in progress, The Love Room won the Neaniko Plano Subtitling Award at last year’s Thessaloniki Documentary Festival. Its world premiere at the Phoenix Film Festival and its European one in the regional competition of ZagrebDox ended up being just three days apart. Bearing in mind its universally interesting topic and the fresh angle it adopts, a tour of smaller documentary and human-rights film festivals should ensue.

Milan Zarubica was sentenced to 13 years in prison for the illegal production and distribution of narcotics, while Daniel Ilievski got a ten-year stretch for assault. Both men are married with children, so every month, they are allowed two family visits and one conjugal visit in one of the several rooms that lend the film its title. On top of that, Daniel enjoys the right to have several weekend releases per year. But these two men, although frequently observed in their prison routines (in Daniel’s case also during leave), are not the protagonists of Dinevski’s film; Milan’s wife Olivera and Daniel’s spouse Ljupka are. On top of being observed in their daily lives while their husbands are absent, and during their own visits to the prison, they also get the chance to speak their minds and express their feelings in interviews and narrations.

Dinevski uses a red herring, of sorts, to open the film, showing Daniel’s routine indoors and Olivera’s outdoors to trick us into thinking that they are a couple. It’s only when we learn that Daniel is going out to visit his family and Olivera, along with her son Filip, comes in to visit Milan that we come to realise the relationships between the characters and their statuses, both indoors and outdoors. The filmmaker also establishes her signature style as a fine blend of different documentary approaches, shifting between an observational one laced with some lyrical, pensive moments (kudos to Honeyland cinematographer Fejmi Daut on doing an equally impressive job here) and some more restrained portrait interviews – and it works, most of the time. In the observational parts, Dinevski sometimes opts for the frequent use of close-ups and irregular angles, which adds to the dynamism, while the measured use of Duke Bojadžiev’s score in the right places adds a bit of mood.

The differences in the couples’ backgrounds add a sense of diversity, but these same differences could also be blamed for the fact that the two female narrators do not fare equally well as the doc’s “characters”. Simply put, Olivera, who is better educated and more eloquent than the down-to-earth Ljupka, gets more of the spotlight and more of a chance to tell her story compellingly. An additional problem appears in the form of the repetitiveness of the themes that crop up in their monologues, suggesting that Dinevski did not dare to encourage them to open up fully and that The Love Room could serve its purpose better in a more compact, mid-length format. Nevertheless, it is still decent as a feature-length documentary.