Croatian filmmaker Karla Crnčević's short and beautiful film essay, Wild Flowers, grew out of some home video tapes recorded by her father thirty years ago. Wild Flowers is, therefore, a film that operates with/from that archive and completes a sensitive and hopeful rehabilitation of its values. Especially boosted now. Re-stimulated, rescued from some corner of the museum of family memory, these VHS recordings come to reaffirm the always inextricable emotional and rational negotiation of people with their past, as well as their ability to find support over pain and loss. , no matter how infamous and disastrous that past may have been.

The material recovered by Karla Crnčević was recorded by her father when he returned to his hometown at the end of the devastating war known as the Third Balkan War or the War of the former Yugoslavia. And although the ethnic, political, and nationalist resonances of the conflict filter through the ruins of the recorded town, such resonances do not occupy the interest of the director in her archival research. Crnčević confessed at the end of the film that his father used a camera that only time. Hence, it is not too irrational to conjecture that the impulse to record responded to an urgency to save (for tomorrow, for oneself) the testimony of the devastation. Incited, no doubt, by the atrocity of the landscape that stretched before his eyes, he wanted to capture it in images! Trapping it on magnetic tapes was much more than a reaction, it was an early affront to oblivion.

Seen now, such images report a stubborn, intimate rebellion: the final gesture when everything already seems impossible. Several demolished houses pass in front of us, the rubble of a town reduced to little more than ashes – captured by an agitated eye eager to record a community devastated by barbarism. In off-screen, Crnčević's father is heard recounting – both of them have a dialogue, since the director tries to find out how much this man remembers – how “he slowly entered the villa to record everything around him, until he reached [his] house”, where He recorded the devastated rooms: “every detail.” He says that the site was “completely destroyed by fire.” Worn by the passage of time, insufficiently sharp, the very texture of the image already speaks for the vestiges of a pulverized home, of a soulless town, which seems to have been uninhabited for a long time.

The director begins the film with a close-up tracking shot that travels through the maritime space of a virtual map, presumably on her computer screen. The cursor moves half disoriented through the blue of the image in an attempt to reach land – an image close to abstraction, everything is seawater. (The movements of the cursor seem to anticipate the turns of the father's camera as it moves through the ruins of the villa.) These views of the virtual sea are preceded by a poem: “This departure […]/ does not follow the movement/ of the ship heading north,/ but rather goes backwards,/ decaying into the past.” The sliding of the cursor could well allude to the director's own dislocation in exile; but it is rather a parable of forced exile, displacement and flight after the war, and more than the event itself, the unrest it unleashes. As the grainy blue of the sea passes across the screen, some subtitles, which perhaps reproduce the author's voice, point out: “When you leave home it is difficult to decide what is the most important thing. I thought […] it wasn't going to last long”; However, “soon the aggression increased, the roads were cut off and the city became more isolated. Over time I forgot the chronology of events, but I did not forget the feeling of farewell.”

We can read in this prologue segment the perspective with which the director returns to the family archives. His gesture calls for the ethical value of those images, not their status as a document of the disaster. In Wild Flowers, the archive is recovered less for its testimony of the effects of war than as an allegation about the resilience of a family, resilience rooted in the relationship that is maintained with those images today (after three decades) and with the impulse that they produced. Of course, Wild Flowers, to complete its ethical revaluation, employs an ingenious techné. Taken from the coffers where they rested for thirty years, and dyed with a new light, such archives are stimulated in their filmic expressiveness: this movement is an assault of rebellion against historical value in the strict sense; It is responsible, in no small measure, for the new vitality that now transforms them (converted into a film) into a collective artifact, when they were just a personal refuge.

Many of the reflections raised by the film emerge thanks to the voice-over dialogue between the director and her father. The cinematographic gesture of Wild Flowers essentially lies in this particularity. Crnčević wants to contrast his father's memories (a personal memory) with the images actually stamped by him on the tapes (material archive). And there are many gaps in the father's memory. He does not remember well, for example, the presence of the director's grandmother. He forgot to have recorded any animal (a cow), and he cannot even specify if he stopped at the Serbian crosses drawn in each corner of the town, even though he emphasized them. These nebulous images are then complements to the frames of your nebulous memory; they consummate the underpinning of a sense of the past and an identity. Because Wild Flowers affirms the value of the archive as a vestige, but also its powerlessness to reveal the state or condition that embraced the person who then sculpted that same archive.

Wild Flowers is about memory, exile, family, war, the archive... It invites you to meditate on these themes with an astonishing economy of resources. Now, this brief film essay has its definitive moment towards the end, when the voice of Crnčević's mother (hell) takes the floor and confesses that, upon returning, “she expected horror and darkness,” but that, in a certain way, moment, “[he saw] a garden full of orange flowers, a garden full of wildflowers that spread very quickly.” He observes: “It was the complete opposite of what I expected.” And finally he states: “but I didn't record it.” Of course, that's another bad move on his memory. While we listen to her comment, the director lets us see the splendid furtive flowers that surround the ruins, unbeatable by time, a confirmation that even where the deepest darkness ensues there are possibilities of rebirth.

There are many films today dedicated to working with the archive, undoubtedly motivated by how they make it possible to pierce new meanings into the petrified official histories. Wild Flowers is a beautiful example of how to breathe new life into personal files. And it is enough to take a quick look at the INSTAR 2024 Film Festival itself, where Crnčević's film is competing for the Nicolás Guillén Landrián Award, to see in the selection this recurrence to the archive by politically committed directors. Together with Wild Flowers, An Asian Ghost Story, Nome, Three Promises, they demonstrate that the archive embodies a political gesture and that it is the material for irrefutable creative acts.