Synopsis
Mitrovica, in northern Kosovo, is divided in two by the river Ibar. On one side live the Serbs, and on the other, the Albanians. While on an artist residency there, Yaela Gottlieb, a Peruvian filmmaker of Romanian heritage, composed this essay on separation. Details of the landscape gleaned during solitary walks and sounds recorded from around the city sketch out its geography and its historical and political fault-lines. The image is peppered with notes from her diary written in a curious mixture of Spanish and English, weaving her own story with local geopolitics. Having recently moved to Germany and split up with her partner, the filmmaker finds echoes of her multiple identity and recent break-up in this city that’s become the archetype of ethnic division. On either side of the river, symbols change and the versions of history diverge. In the north, a cross; in the south, the call of a muezzin. Between the two is a bridge taken by no one except NATO security forces and the curious filmmaker, digital camera in one hand and mini DV in the other. In contrast to the soul-searching that arouses her melancholy, one certainty emerges: the south is separated from the north. Another – implicit – certainty is that the south is also the global south from where Yaela Gottlieb hails, separated from the north where she has been living for a short while. Through the process of transposition, I couldn’t draw you a map makes Mitrovica the setting in which each note of the score resonates: emotional, identity-related and territorial. From this impossible mapmaking, the film offers a possible framework: a single shot, filmed twice.
