Review: As If I Am Not There (15) ****

Now Irish producer-turned-director Juanita Wilson has delivered another devastating take on the conflict seen through the eyes of one young woman.

Natasa Petrovic plays Samira, a happy-go-lucky lass who leaves her parents’ home in Sarajevo and travels to a remote village to teach the kids in the local school. She has been there only a matter of days before armed militiamen round up the people, separate the sexes, shoot the menfolk and put the women to work. Samira, a pretty girl, is kept apart, along with some younger women and a child. Their fate is to be the sexual playthings of the Serb gunmen.

Wilson bases her film on the book of the same name by Slavenka Drakuli and does not flinch from illustrating Samira’s experiences. But there is a moment of epiphany in which Samira recognises that to survive she must retain her humanity. And her femininity. Her acceptance of what must be done to ensure her survival is shocking in its simplicity.

Like Elem Klimov’s Come and See, As If I Am Not There is an odyssey into evil. It is also a story of fortitude, with a stand-out performance from Petrovic. Fedya Stukan also shines as the militia commander who like Dirk Bogarde to Charlotte Rampling in The Night Porter, starts to feel empathy for the girl he is regularly raping.

This is an extraordinary film – a harrowing testament to man’s inhumanity to (wo)man, and of an all-too recent period of history that can never be repeated. Can it?

On staggered release