‘At The Door Of The House, Who Will Come Knocking’: Sarajevo Review

Dir: Maja Novakovic. Serbia/Bosnia and Herzegovina. 2024. 84mins

There’s plenty to admire in Maja Novakovic’s debut, a feature doc/hybrid, as we initially watch the elderly and bearded Emin Bektic (although he is never called directly by name), who lives an isolated life in the wilds of Bosnia and Herzegovina, going about his business against a blanket of snow. Then, as her immersive and diligently observant film progresses, the viewer is transported into a more imagined but no less authentic emotional landscape. 

Immersive and diligently observant

It’s a combination that proved a winning one at Sheffield DocFest, where At the Door of the House, Who Will Come Knocking took the International Competition prize. It now plays in competition at Sarajevo, and further festivals and arthouse distributors are likely to take a shine to this ambitious and unusual hybrid.

The cold of rural Bosnia and Herzegovina is indicated by a horse’s trough of frozen water, which Bektic breaks with the back of an axe as the animal watches on. In a film which falls into its subject’s rhythm, this is just one of the many routines that also include tree chopping and fire lighting; a pack of cigarettes initially the only indication that Bektic must have some sort of contact with others. The solitary mood nudges further towards loneliness after an encounter with a neighbour who insists he has no time to stop and chat.

Novakovic introduces a more ethereal element as the season suddenly shifts from winter to summer. The green of the landscape is like an adrenaline shot. Soon, the mood shifts and a a small boy starts to scamper through her film. It becomes apparent he is intended to represent something beyond the here and now. At one moment, the child is literally connected to the old man by a thread that is being unspooled, but the nature of that link remains enigmatic and for the audience to define.

Although a sense of loss is palpable here, the tone is not unremittingly bleak. Novakovic, who acts as her own cinematographer, is invisible as a physical presence, but displays mastery of the mood and its ebbs and flows. Light shafts fall on a stool in a way that would delight Vermeer, shadows dance up a wall at night, and Novakovic invites us to imagine the realities of Bektic’s world in the past and present. 

The spare score from Luka Barajevic, with low strings and woodwind, largely mirrors and enhances the elegiac mood.  “You and the mountains are the only ones who understand me,” Bektic tells his horse. So, it appears, does Novakovic, and her careful articulation of the real and the imagined also allows a connection to bloom between subject and audience.