Varun Sasindran

Omarska, Varun Sasindran (2018)

Omarska, Varun Sasindran (2018)

 

Born in Kerala, India, Varun Sasindran studied electronics and communication engineering, working as a software engineer before he quit his job and devoted his attention to cinema. Sasindran studied visual media at Kerala's University of Calicut and pursued his Masters at the Sarajevo Film Academy, before going on to study at Le Fresnoy - Studio National des Arts Contemporains in France. His short film Omarska premiered at the Berlin International Film Fsetival, where it won a Special Mention from the Jury; Kyiv, where it won a Special Mention; Bucharest, where it won Best Director; Santiago de Chile, where it won Best Documentary Short; and Stuttgarter Film Winter, where it won Best Film.

Varun Sasindran participated in an exclusive interview with Filmatique as part of Talents 2020.

 

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FILMATIQUE: Omarska begins with an interview.  Nusreta Sivac, a survivor of the Omarska concentration camp in Prijedor, Bosnia-Herzegovina, is invited to relate the time she spent there working in the kitchen.  When did you initially have the idea for this project, and what does the film signify for you?

VARUN SASINDRAN: First of all, thanks a lot for selecting my film to this program. I hope the film will reach more audiences in Canada and US. Coming to your question, when studying at the Sarajevo Film Academy I lived in Bosnia for over one year. During these times, I got a chance to travel to different parts of the country. One of the places I visited during this time was Srebrenica, a place that witnessed a genocide in which thousands of people were killed. Visiting Srebrenica and the memorial there had a profound impact on me. I started studying the civil war in Bosnia through books, videos, documentaries, journals, and through my acquaintances in Bosnia. Through these collective sources, I got to know about Omarska as well. I was very intrigued by the present situation of the site which is now a fully functional mine factory acquired by Arcelormittal. There is no place in Prijedor that remembers the victims, and people have been fighting for a memorial for the last 25 years. Through this film, my only attempt was to uplift their voices, voices which cannot be avoided or ignored.

FLMTQ: With the interview serving as a point of departure, Omarska moves to a train station as Sivac, a former judge, recounts the circumstances that led to her arrival.  The film's visuals evolve from snowy exteriors shot through a bus window, to images of empty corridors, administration building floorplans, and eventually an animated, three-dimensional rendering of the camp itself.  Can you comment on these visual techniques—why did you choose this particular cinematic language, and how do you believe this spatial rendering can serve to reconstruct and/or resurrect collective memory?

VS: In fact, there was no crew while shooting the film and these limitations made me choose this cinematic language.  However, it was pretty clear from the beginning that I didn't want to make a straightforward or traditional TV-style documentary. As a viewer, I sometimes get very interested in knowing about the whole process of a documentary and with this film, I wanted to be more revealing of my process as well, but not for the sake of showing it as it is. For example, from the very first shot, I am revealing the set-up or mise-en-scène just to give an idea of how I conduct an interview—at the same time, it was a very relaxed way of starting a film's narration.

About those archive photographs you mentioned, it was quite a big challenge to find the architectural plans. With Oh Eun (my animator), we had to start all over again many times until we got the right architecture plan from the UN archives. Even in the UN archives, we found different architecture plans for the same site. The fact that I didn't get permission to visit this site made it more difficult. So it was quite a task to decide on the right architecture plan—we had to correlate it with the testimonies and old videos to get more clarity. After all this, I thought it could be interesting to show the archive source as a sub-layer but not presenting it as a process we went though while making the film, but something which serves the narrative. And all the rest of the images in the film are shot based on the testimonies. The process was—first I conduct the interview, then I am in search of images based on the testimony. 

 
Omarska, Varun Sasindran (2018)

Omarska, Varun Sasindran (2018)

 

FLMTQ: At a certain point Sivac remarks, of losing her job as a judge, "They told me 'you don't work here anymore...' I realized the only reason was my identity."  While the 700 civilians who lost their lives at Omarska have never been officially honored, their stories are all too common in a world where where ethnic and political violence has become widespread.  Why do you believe it is necessary to tell these stories, not only for the victims of Omarska, but for others as well?

VS: I come from a small village in Kerala. The only access to the outside world while I was young was to go to the library, which was few meters away from my home. It was through those books that I have traveled to different places, different times, different events, different people and later film festivals played a part too. In the end, it's mainly those works which mark history and remain accessible to coming generations.  Regarding Omarska, I thought it quite important to talk about it because of what it is now. After 25 years of civil war, it is quite important to have a sense of reckoning and it needs to come from the authorities first.  One of the prime questions I ask through my film is "Is it possible to move forward by ignoring the past?"

FLMTQ: Are you working on any new projects, and if so, can you tell us a bit about them?

VS: Yes, my next film is a continuation of Omarska. It's about a woman called Hajra Hadžić, who was detained in Omarska.  Hajra Hadžić was first mentioned to me by Nusreta Sivac during my interview in 2018. During the interview, I didn't bother to follow up on Hajra, but later when I re-listened to Nusreta's testimony while making sound notes, I got this feeling that I had missed out on something important during my journey. This feeling strengthened as time passed by. So I started to dig into the tribunal's criminal records archives to see if Hajra got a fair trial and I found out that many of the testimonies on Hajra went unrecorded.

This is the staring point of my next film. Now I am in the development stage and I hope to get my dossier ready soon.  I am looking forward to find a writing residency program where I can be in good company, that could inspire me to bring new ideas into my project. The project had been selected as one among other ten projects at Berlinale Talents. Once again, thanks a lot for selecting my film for Filmatique Talents.

 

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Interview by Ursula Grisham
Head Curator, Filmatique

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