cinematography
Emanuele Pasquet
editing
Desideria Rayner
with Giampiero Civico

music
Nedim Zlatar
sound
Mattia Biadene

with
Mirela Hodo
Kristaq Nina
Denis Nina
Mathias Nina

production
Kama Productions
co-production
MESS
producer
Riccardo Biadene
co-producer
Nihad Kreševljaković

contact
Kama Productions
www.kamaproductions.eu
studiok@kamaproductions.eu

International and Italian
press office
Lionella Fiorillo
lionella.fiorillo@storyfinders.it

Mirela, a forty-year-old Bosnian woman, lives in Rimini with her partner and their two children. Driven by an unresolved past, she returns to Sarajevo, where she lived until the age of ten at the Dom Bjelave orphanage. Evacuated on a humanitarian convoy at the outbreak of the war, she now finds her childhood friends: Amela, her best friend, Branko, an almost brotherly figure, and others. Together they rediscover the city and the institution, now rebuilt, that once welcomed her. Initially reluctant and uncertain in her feelings toward the memory of her mother, Mirela feels a vague yet powerful sense of loss. Her journey turns into a search for her mother, and for herself, which leads her to the village where she was born, in the Republika Srpska, to recover her birth certificate. A steep road of courage and reconquest, to answer a false question: who legitimizes my being in the world, when I myself “feel like a flower, as if I came from the earth?” Through archival footage of besieged Sarajevo and intimate memories, the film intertwines personal memory with the history of an entire people.

2025 Dom
2020 Pierrot sui binari (short, doc)
2022 Samira (short)
2021 Le mani sulle nuvole (short)
2013 La stanza (short)
2012 Il duello (short)
2011 La panchina (short)

“When I met Mirela, I sensed in her two souls: being a mother today and still being a daughter marked by abandonment. Her intimate return to Sarajevo is a symbolic journey, in search of her own origins. In this journey, archival footage of besieged Sarajevo emerges like fragments of dreams, filling the gaps of a broken memory. During filming, a creative and emotional dialogue without interruptions developed between what was on screen and off screen, guided by an ethical awareness supported by the psychodrama method applied during shooting, with the full participation of a professional figure dedicated to listening and dialogue, ensuring the protection of all the roles involved, including the crew and especially Mirela, in relation to the camera, the production on set, and the entire time span of the work. From a stylistic point of view, the visual and sound language was shaped almost by osmosis by the forms of this human relationship. The choice of the 4:3 format was aimed at compressing space into a “close-up” psychological frame, where sounds and music express an inner flow.” (Massimiliano Battistella)

Massimiliano Battistella, born in Rome in 1985, followed up a degree in literary criticism with further studies in the humanities and visual arts. He got an early start in the audiovisual sector, gaining experience as a director’s assistant and in casting which gave him the opportunity to work with leading Italian and international filmmakers. He has written and directed short films that have made the rounds of major festivals and have been nominated for Academy awards, then distributed and sold in Europe, Asia, the United States and South America. More recently, he has made the short doc Pierrot sui binari, winner of several international awards.