A Film a Week - Dwelling Among the Gods / Među bogovima

 previously published on Cineuropa

Sometimes, it is hard to put a human face to large-scale and long-lasting events, such as the current refugee crisis, or even find the words to describe them, before one gets lost in numbers and statistical data. With his sophomore fiction feature, Dwelling Among the Gods, Vuk Ršumović tries to do just that by telling a story that happened (or at least could have happened) to people in Serbia, along the “Balkan Route”. It has premiered in the fiction competition of the 30th Sarajevo Film Festival.

An Afghan family consisting of mother Fereshteh (Fereshteh Hoseini), her husband, Reza (Reza Akhlaghirad), and three of their children has stopped in a refugee centre in Serbia en route to Germany. Through NGO lawyer Zoran (Vule Marković) and Dari-language interpreter Nikola (Nikola Ristanovski), Fereshteh has learned that the young man who drowned recently might be her brother Ali. She sets off on a mission to prove his identity and her relationship to him, claim his body and organise a proper burial.

However, every step of the way, there is a logistical, legal or bureaucratic obstacle to overcome, and time is of the essence, since members of Reza’s family want to continue their journey as soon as possible. The waiting and running around in circles affect the couple, too, and the fact that their elder, teenage daughter has fallen for a guy from their camp does not make things any more bearable. The idealistic Nikola is very willing to help, the more realistic Zoran less so, given that Fereshteh is not his only client, but the system personified in the nameless clerk (Petar Zekavica) is simply too rigid for such situations. And Fereshteh’s father’s insisting on getting Ali’s body to Afghanistan makes things all the more complicated.

For his previous film, 2014’s No One’s Child, Ršumović drew inspiration from a real-life case to tell the story of an individual who has to learn to survive in a closed system within a wider one that also depends on politics. While he changes the protagonist, the setting is quite similar here, with one or two added layers of “systems”, since Fereshteh also has to navigate her family, her primary cultural and religious environment, as well as Serbian bureaucracy. Crediting investigative reporter Momir Turudić as the co-screenwriter also suggests the origin of the story is rooted in true events that were happening along the Balkan Route.

Portraying the murky-grey landscape of both life inside the refugee centre on the outskirts of Belgrade and life in Serbia in general through the lens of Damjan Radovanović’s often handheld, cinéma vérité-style camerawork is a logical and fitting choice here that adds to the sense of urgency. The sound design by Dubravka Premar also stands out, filling the sonic landscape with a realistic murmur, meaning that Dwelling Among the Gods acts like a legitimate successor to the cinéma vérité classics.

The trouble arises elsewhere: in the casting and the work with the actors. The Iranian performers chosen for the two leads operate in an elevated emotional register, and the rest of the cast in a restrained, more realistic one, and this “clash” does not work in the leading actors’ favour. Also, the dramaturgical devices introduced to feed the audience with the context of Afghan culture where Fereshteh, as a woman, does not have the same degree of agency as her husband, father or brother, barely scratch the surface and merely constitute common knowledge. In the end, Dwelling Among the Gods is a noble and, to some extent, accomplished work, but its cinematic qualities remain unworthy of the urgency of the story it tells.