The Eclipse

She left Serbia a long time ago and never looked back. But then Nataša Urban discovered her father’s hiking diary and began to connect his entries to the events of the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s. The 1999 total eclipse of the sun is the central motif, employed by Urban as a metaphor for the way a dark past remains part of the present. Kitted out with analogue film equipment, the director travels back to find the stories of her family, intimate friends and acquaintances. Urban skilfully combines 16 mm and Super 8 film with archive material to explore the blurred boundaries between the individual and the collective, the private and public spheres, the personal and the political, resulting in an enchantingly beautiful work of art. (Lina Dinkla, DOK Leipzig)