This film will also be available online on our VoD platform from April 18 to April 30, 2023. Please note: This film will only be available in Germany.

»Tell me what you’re planning to do so I know what it’s about«, the mother asks her daughter. »Nothing. Did you think I was going to ask you questions and that you’d be shocked? It’s supposed to be more like a conversation […] about what we’ve gone through, as a country and as individuals.« The country that no longer exists is Yugoslavia, and the people talking are the family and friends of film-maker Nataša Urban.
Urban took her father’s hiking journal and began to connect his entries from the 1990s with the events of the Yugoslav wars. Succinct observations on daily life meet beguiling landscapes that appear imprinted with the uncanny. In retracing the old walking routes and in Urban’s conversations with relatives, memories come flashing back: of unspeakable poverty in the former Yugoslavia, of minor escalations of violence in the neighbourhood, right through to the atrocities of Srebrenica. Urban skilfully combines analogue film images of her family and familiar surroundings with archive material, so that the boundaries between the personal and the political—past and present—seem blurred. The motif of the solar eclipse serves as a framing device: while in 1961, people gathered together in the streets to take in this natural wonder, in 1999 in Serbia they were barricading themselves in their houses in fear of the approaching moon’s shadow. The Eclipse stunningly demonstrates how the recent past still overshadows the country today.

Awards for »The Eclipse«
DOX:AWARD Best International Feature Documentary – CPH:DOX 2022