A LETTER TO DAD

DOUBLE FEATURE
“Why did you want to die alone?” – With this question young Serbian filmmaker Srđjan Keča opens a documentary journey into his family’s past. Searching for reasons why his terminally ill father chose to die without saying goodbye to his wife and son, the director sifts through old photos and letters, watches family videos, talks to relatives and friends. Moving forward from the young man’s involvement in Party organizations to his engagement, marriage and subsequent parenthood, the film soon arrives at the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s, a turning point in the life of the father and so many other people in the former Yugoslavia. Although we learn few details about his experiences as a volunteer in the Serbian army, the words of his former comrades, the expressions on their faces, convey something of the devastation those years wreaked on everybody involved. And the filmmaker’s questions begin to change, to focus on the issue of personal accountability in the tangled maze of history. “We always put the blame on war, but it’s human beings who make war, isn’t it?”