Kumjana Novakova

Built solely from forensic visual archive and testimonies, Silence of Reason acts as a memory itself: elusive, fluid, rejecting framing, moving in all directions, spatial and temporal. The singular experiences of violence and torture to women from the Foča rape camps during the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina become our own collective memories, surpassing time and space.

A man, a child, two wars, a river, a tree. A man and a child meet under a tree on a river bank, sharing the same memory and a secret. They find in each other the serenity, the silence and the time they lost in the flowing water of the river.

A space in silence, where past has captured present. Taking over, layer by layer, the collective pain enters the landscape, the space, the city. Eventually, it enters us. Srebrenica becomes a reality of today, and our own reality.

In Sarajevo, in a cinema’s projection booth, lives Sena; a woman who in daily solitude repeats the projection of the few Yugoslavian films of which there are copies. Through a combination of silence, the everyday gestures of this woman and the films that are projected from her living room, comes a film built like a day in Sena’s life. Through the films that Sena projects, we are taken on a journey in both collective and personal memory. The film offers a portrait of intimacy crossed with a history witnessed by cinema; a history which Sena has conserved.