28 Lug DOM

Mirela, a forty-year-old Bosnian woman, lives in Rimini with her partner and their two children. Driven by an unresolved past, she returns to Sarajevo, where she lived until the age of ten at the Dom Bjelave orphanage. Evacuated on a humanitarian convoy at the outbreak of the war, she now finds her childhood friends: Amela, her best friend, Branko, an almost brotherly figure, and others. Together they rediscover the city and the institution, now rebuilt, that once welcomed her. Initially reluctant and uncertain in her feelings toward the memory of her mother, Mirela feels a vague yet powerful sense of loss. Her journey turns into a search for her mother, and for herself, which leads her to the village where she was born, in the Republika Srpska, to recover her birth certificate. A steep road of courage and reconquest, to answer a false question: who legitimizes my being in the world, when I myself “feel like a flower, as if I came from the earth”? Through archival footage of besieged Sarajevo and intimate memories, the film intertwines personal memory with the history of an entire people.