Displacement Like This is Happening Everywhere

On a Friday at 10:36 a.m. in 1992, 11-year-old Lana picks up a phone call whose effects reverberate through her life. This is the hypnotic refrain that loops through Iva Radivojević’s second narrative feature, “When the Phone Rang” (2024), presented at the Locarno Film Festival’s Concorso Cineasti del Presente section.

A self-hypnosis, this call marks a double trauma for Lana as she simultaneously loses her grandfather and her country. Thrown into a prolonged state of dislocation, Lana experiences a fragmentation of her memories and history. To cope with the effects of migration, she obsessively replays the phone call, clinging to what she knows to be true while her national identity and sense of home are rapidly altered and renegotiated.

The result is a film that is part travelogue and part reconstruction of a memory, favoring an amorphous form that seeks to bridge geographical boundaries. Radivojević doesn’t explicitly name the dissolved country as Yugoslavia, referring to it only as the “country that no longer exists.” She states, “This kind of displacement is happening everywhere, as in Ukraine, Palestine, and Sudan. I wanted it to be universal and relatable to any moment in time.”

Born in Serbia and currently based in Lesbos, Greece, Radivojević’s prolific work, comprising short films, documentaries, and one feature-length narrative – “Aleph” (2021) – often explores themes of dislocation, fluidity in national identity, and itinerancy. Her sophomore feature continues along these lines but also marks her first foray into excavating her own history as she finds a place she wants to call home.

“After leaving Yugoslavia, I grew up in Cyprus, then lived in the U.S. for a long time before returning to Greece. Something about returning to the culture I grew up in triggered something. You get so busy surviving that you don’t have time to address your trauma, and at some point, it wants to talk to you. It felt like the right moment for it, especially with the mass dislocation happening all over the world.”

To bring this vision to life, Radivojević returned to Serbia and assembled an eight-person crew where everyone juggled multiple roles. As Radivojević put it, “big sets make me nervous,” so she also served as her own art director. Budget constraints led her to live in the same apartment where the film was shot, an experience she found somewhat uncomfortable but ultimately necessary for the project.

She gathered old friends, neighbors, and family photographs to recreate a portrait of a child and her neighborhood, using a familiar cast of characters who once populated her life. “It’s about imprinting them in time and space and memory, so they aren’t forgotten or cease to exist. I want them to exist.” In one euphoric moment, Radivojević managed to bring her yearned-for past within reach.

Radivojević has long used voiceover as a device in her work. Reflecting the state of migrants, the disembodied voice “shapeshifts” across boundaries, searching for a home. She notes, “When migrants move, they change languages and identities. Shapeshifting is the nature of migrants.”

Radivojević likens the voice to a ghost haunting the images, serving as a reminder of the loss of clarity in pictorial memory. As the narrator’s voice modulates to reflect both inner and outer experiences, the telephone becomes a kind of time machine, allowing the past and future to converse.

A child emerges as a crucial figure in this dialogue, not only because of Radivojević’s memories but also because viewing the story from a child’s perspective, with their “raw and simple feelings,” enables expansive “emotional affect.” It’s a nod to children’s “power, intelligence, and resilience.”

Instead of sensationalizing the violent traumas, the film focuses on the moments that brought Lana joy, like getting bad haircuts, dancing in the kitchen, or feeling love for a friend for the first time. Emphasizing moments of profound joy makes Lana’s later grief all the more poignant.

“I want to share the heartache,” Radivojević confesses. “The wound can close once you have invited witnesses to the pain.” And the witness could just be yourself.