Lost in Time: Serbian Filmmaker Returns to Once-Forgotten Memories
Emilija Gašić is a Serbian filmmaker based in New York City. Her debut feature film, 78 Days, premiered at International Film Festival Rotterdam in January 2024. Courtesy of the director.
Re-watching the family’s old Hi8 footage from the 1999 NATO bombing of Yugoslavia nearly 25 years later during the COVID lockdown, Serbian filmmaker Emilija Gašić notes a strange normality in each tape. Just a young child at the time, she and her sisters lived as any other child did, entertained themselves as you would on a Sunday afternoon stuck in the house, and experienced daily life at its normal creeping pace. If not for the military airplanes and sirens, these tapes could be representative of any given day of a child’s life. War or not, one must live. Gašić returns to these once-forgotten memories in her debut feature film, 78 Days.
78 Days, which premiered in January at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, follows three sisters who filmed home videos during the two-and-a-half-month-long NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in response to the Kosovo War. The videos capture milestones and childhood moments amid these unusual circumstances.
Latin-alphabet poster for Emilija Gašić’s 78 Days (2024). Courtesy of the director.
The film is based upon Gašić’s own experiences stumbling across old Hi8 tapes of her family, who are prolific home-videomakers, although as the baby of the family, Gašić was ironically rarely allowed to shoot with the camera. “I remember finding the videos during the bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999, and that was very evocative for me. I was in the videos; my whole family was there. There’s this weird, eerie atmosphere, and you could hear the planes … I realized I want to make a film that feels like this, you know? You find a tape 25 years later, and you uncover your buried memories from a time that you haven’t really dealt with because it’s a painful time in history.”
She discovered her passion for film as many of us did — through grainy VHS recordings of cable TV movie mainstays like Highlander and Clash of the Titans. The Lord of the Rings films, however, are the ones she credits with sparking her interest in pursuing film as a career — she recalls watching The Fellowship of the Ring and asking her mother what occupation she would need to have, in order to make movies like that. “I watched it on a very poor DIVX on a small computer, but still, to me, that was incredible,” she tells IMPULSE. “I just remember thinking, ‘That’s exactly how I thought of it.’ This is what I imagined in my head, and Peter Jackson just opened up my head and put it on a screen,” she says.
Emilija Gašic, 78 Days, 2024, film still. Courtesy of the director.
She studied directing at the Academy of Arts in Belgrade and cinematography at NYU Tisch. She credits Lukas Moodysson and Nana Ekvtimishvili’s explorations of girlhood as reference points for 78 Days.
Going back to the old-school, “democratized” Hi8 camcorder of her childhood to shoot the actual film was cathartic in its own right, calling to mind the sensations and experiences of playing with the same camera with her two sisters. “There was something about the Hi8 medium that I really appreciated,” Gašić says. “It immediately brought me back to that time, and I always found them cinematic. It’s shot by laypeople who are not in film, but it still feels like it was directed or edited at some point.”
Emilija Gašic, 78 Days, 2024, film still. Courtesy of the director.
Although 78 Days is not a documentary, Gašić remarks that many non-Serbian viewers think that it uses documentary footage, which Gašić takes as a compliment. “The crew and cast really worked hard to make it look as immersive as possible, so it looks like it did fall out from that time,” she says.
Gašić recalls that one of the most bittersweet parts of touring this film is hearing from those from other countries struck by war — one from Angola, another from Ukraine, all connected by the tragedy and resilience of continuing to be a person, despite being stuck in circumstances unconducive to normal life.
Emilija Gašic, 78 Days, 2024, film still. Courtesy of the director.
Gašić says the lack of cinema surrounding the NATO bombing and the gap in Serbian cinema more generally have made the project all the more poignant, especially after her first screening for a predominantly Serbian audience in Palić this past July — hearing back from those who lived through the same routines and machinations of humanhood under the backdrop of the bombing, depending on neighborhood and community to find relief from the daily stress of life under fire. “Nothing can really replace this experience, because I feel like all the jokes, all the emotional parts of the movie hit harder in a room full of people who have lived through this and remember this,” Gašić says.
Gašić’s body of work is observant and subtle. In a world where catastrophe and death are inevitable, why not create comforts and small rebellions to affirm one’s will against the harsh face of fate?
This vision is amplified by focusing on the point of view of young girls — there is a purity, innocence, and drive for observation through an untainted lens that permeates much of her cinematic work. This unique angle reaffirms the belief that the small beauties of life may overpower the larger horrors. Yes, there is war and violence, but there are also children playing and fighting. There are still tender moments and random acts of kindness.
In Gašić’s short film The Wait, for example, young Jovana’s father is caught up in an extortion plot that threatens the family’s well-being, but what is a child to do? She plays with a tape recorder, rides a tricycle in the attic, listens, and sleeps. And what do sisters do when caught in the devastation of war and horror? Well, they act like sisters. Perhaps Gašić’s greatest strength as a filmmaker lies in the ability to forsake the brutal, to promise kindness in the heat of violence.
You Might Also Like:
Image, Object, and Compression with Asher Liftin
Music for the Eyes: “Crafting the Ballets Russes” at the Morgan Library & Museum
