Formørkelsen / The Eclipse

Once she was old enough, Nataša Urban left her native Serbia as fast as humanly possible. She never looked back – until today. Courageously and persistently, she probes into how the disintegration of Yugoslavia, the genocide, and the war crimes of the 1990s have etched themselves into the lives of her family and friends. A painful, pushback-ridden process of remembrance begins, in which the manifold shades of then and now are placed in a dialogue. The world history and everyday life of individuals often run parallel or only marginally overlap – and then suddenly collide with each other at full force in individual life stories. Nataša Urban's film is an imposing work of visual archaeology that peels away layer after layer of silence and intentional forgetting to clearly reveal that the past is far from wrapped up. The solar eclipse congeals into a formative metaphor – knowledge and truth cannot be observed directly. If they can be seen at all, then only through a sooty pane of glass.