Then Comes the Evening

A summary review by Emmanuel Chicon for Visions du Reel in Nyon, Switzerland:

"Bathed in light announcing the arrival of dusk, the setting of hills in the east of Bosnia is crossed by a flock guided by a stooped silhouette. A new day begins for the protagonists of Then Comes The Evening, the silent and pastoral cycle of these two women living in autarchy on land providing them with a frugal living. Bitter labour that hollows the bodies, bodies whose texture, rendered by the filmmaker's tactile camera, seems to blend into the environment that they decorate with their discrete and familiar presence. In this ageless pastoral world, which unfurls in a present ruled over by rituals, the humans exchange only gestures. They keep language for the beasts or to directly address an indifferent or hostile environment, with words that gush out in an attempt to appease the potential violence of a storm. Unbelievable magic that nonetheless comes to designate an eminently human activity. Through her simple and precise pictorial compositions, Maja Novakovic successfully and profoundly sketches out the intangibility of a condition."