Trama

AFTERWAR is filmed over 15 years. Director Birgitte Stærmose originally met the cast in 2008 when they were children selling cigarettes and peanuts on the streets of postwar Pristina and returned again in 2018 and to film another 5 years with them as adults. The film builds on the lived experience of the cast and is based on extensive interviews and a co-creation process with them. They tell their collective story through monologues spoken directly to the camera as well as staged, scripted scenes, sometimes together with professional actors and sometimes with amateurs. This is not a documentary; nor a true fiction film, but a performative testament to the war that lives on in people, when the fighting is over.

Burning buildings in a dense fog, a dead horse on a dusty road, people fleeing through harsh mountain landscapes. AFTERWAR opens with images from war-torn Kosovo, 1999, as a dark chapter in the history of modern Europe draws to a close.

After the war, children sell peanuts and cigarettes on the streets of Pristina in order to survive. Against the eerie backdrops of postwar Pristina they speak to us: 'There's only one reason I'm talking to you. It is my hunger! I'm so hungry, I could eat your money!' A decade later, little has changed. In a cinematic testament co-created over 15 years, the children transform into adults before our eyes. Yet the child still stares back at us from behind the adult gaze, as the struggle to survive becomes a struggle for a future at all. They confront us with their innermost secrets and desires, while stuck in limbo and haunted by their past.

The film fuses its fictional story line with strong documentary elements. Through a close artistic collaboration with the lead cast - Xhevahire, Gëzim, Shpresim, and Besnik - the film builds on their lived experience and is inspired by extensive interviews over several years with them. They tell their collective story through monologues spoken directly to the camera as well as staged, scripted scenes, sometimes together with professional actors and sometimes with amateurs. In this manner the film moves between raw realism, staged performance, and an existential meditation on the long-term repercussions of war. Any war, anywhere.