78 Days

A Serbian father is called up for military service during the NATO bombings in 1999. Three siblings begin filming a diary in their home with a Hi8 video camera. The camera captures everything from arguments to games and house parties. The fragile and intimate everyday life is interrupted by air raid sirens and the sounds of bombing.

Blurring the line between home video and cinema, Emilija Gašić’s debut feature 78 Days feels both nostalgic and voyeuristic: as if an old video camera had been found in the basement of the collective subconscious, bringing past trauma back to the surface. The videos, showing picturesque rural landscapes and everyday family life, root the narrative in the young girls’ perspective, often overlooked in war films. Each of the sisters takes turns as narrator while holding the camera.

78 Days offers a glimpse into a time and place where radio and television shape the reality of rural families. The children’s imagination, quarrels, and games blend with the surrounding world, as the girls hold an anti-NATO demonstration and sing mocking songs about the bombing Americans. Joy and terror go hand in hand, and emotions run high when a boy and a young girl arrive in the village from the city. Does the wait for father’s return become unbearable?

Elias Jurvanen