Still: Home Game - Lidija Zelovic

When Lidija Zelovic was growing up in Sarajevo, she decided at one stage to become a vegetarian. This was a radical decision for someone living in the Balkans where everyone eats meat all the time.

“Randomly, some things happen in life,” the director, who has been based in Amsterdam for many years (and whose new feature Home Game* screens in International Competition in IDFA), reflects on why her vegetarianism eventually meant so much to her.

As she points out, the years passed and war came. “I was 21 when war started - and 22 when I left for the Netherlands.”

Suddenly, people who had previously lived peacefully side by side had a new identity. Some were Serbs, some were Muslims, others were Croats. Yugoslavia had ceased to exist. When she tried to define herself in this strange and combustible new world, Zelovic clung to being vegetarian. “At least I had something which was mine and that you couldn’t take away from me...I stuck to it.”

Zelovic wasn’t just a vegetarian. She was a filmmaker too. As a refugee building a new life in Amsterdam, she shot thousands of hours of footage - and she continues to record her life on camera today. Snippets from her huge personal archive feature in the new film.

“I have made two other personal films. I do keep on recycling the footage I have filmed over time.”

The new documentary has a very particular focus. Zelovic has grown to love the Netherlands, but she has witnessed an alarming lurch to the right in the country. The documentary includes footage of political firebrand Pim Fortuyn and filmmaker Theo Van Gogh, who were both murdered. It chronicles the way that the Dutch political scene has increasingly come to resemble the powder keg in the Balkans she remembers from 30 years ago. There is an intolerance and xenophobia in the Netherlands that she simply doesn’t remember from when she first arrived in the country.

Zelovic has been filming for so long that, almost accidentally, she has chronicled these profound and dangerous changes in the society.

“It’s my story but it is a film about the Netherlands,” she says. “I really had to find a way of telling the Dutch a story about themselves without them killing or hating me.”

The film, which has been picked up for distribution by Cinema Delicatessen who are expected to release it in Dutch cinemas next year, has a voice-over in which the director describes herself in the third person. “I wanted to have this voice-over that knows more than ‘Lidija’ knew at the time,” she explains why she didn’t use first person narration. “There is also this part of yourself with all immigrants where you develop a completely new persona when you leave home.”

Structuring the film was a challenge. The director isn’t just using her own personal footage but is drawing from archive material of everything from Sarajevo in the 90s to rival fans fighting in football stadiums.

Zelovic acknowledges that she is nervous about how the documentary will be received at its premiere in one of Amsterdam’s most prestigious venues, the Carré Theatre. She is quite prepared for viewers to dislike the movie, but she hopes that, at the very least, they will discuss it. Far worse, she adds, would be for the audience to be indifferent.

“The Netherlands is really, really important in my life. I am living here. My son is here. We are going to stay here. I find it really, really important that they [the Dutch] hear me...this is a really, really dangerous time. You have no idea how [easily] it can get out of control,” Zelovic signs off.

Home Game is produced by Conijn Film. For more information about IDFA 2024, click here.

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*Film is supported by the Netherlands Film Fund