Correspondence with History: Epistolary Forms in Srđan Keča’s A Letter to Dad

• In Event: Yugoslav Internationalisms III: Domestic Recollections and International Gazes in Cinema after Yugoslavia

Abstract

“Hej tata,” begins the voiceover in Srdjan Keča’s A Letter to Dad (2011), “why did you want to die alone?” Keča’s documentary is a second-person address from a son to his father, a letter-film (Naficy: 2001) that probes the uncomfortable and the unknowable of his father’s life. This narrative device echoes one of the key archives in Keča’s documentary: the epistolary courtship between his parents conducted while his father was doing his military service in the 1970s. The documentary, on the whole, attempts to get to the core mystery around the father’s decision to fight on the Croatian front in the 1990s as a Serbian volunteer. These are high stakes: tackling the sensitive topic of Serbian participation in the Yugoslav wars means addressing the silence around collective responsibility and reckoning with his own father’s decision to volunteer.
Even as Keča turns to family members hoping to find out about his father’s wartime participation in Croatia, there are no concrete discoveries, just fragments that simply lead to more questions. Keča finds a cinematic solution to this aporia, I argue, by overwriting the images of the past — specifically the postcards from the family’s archive — in order to create a space for his own ethical commentary. I analyse how Keča uses the postcard to displace idealized images with new landscapes for a post-war reality. I discuss how Keča finds a visual lexicon to convey social responsibility, creating a poetic interpretative horizon for the viewer that eschews the language of guilt and blame.

Author

• Dragana Obradovic, U of Toronto (Canada)