Tatjana Božić: The Collective Keeps You Warm, But it Also Keeps an Eye on You

We first met Tatjana Božić, the director of Fragments of Belonging, at the 20th Sarajevo Film Festival. At the time, her Happily Ever After — a very personal film with a distinctive poetic style — received a special jury award. It was a kind of journey through the director’s love life, in which she visited all her former partners, trying to understand why her relationships kept falling apart.

 

About ten years older, living on the outskirts of Amsterdam alone with her son and without sufficient social support, she was searching for the reasons behind her own sense of not fitting in. Born in Croatia, she had lived in Bosnia, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands, yet she never had a feeling of home, belonging, or rootedness. She tried to force it into existence — but it didn’t work. She sought closeness in every way she knew how. That didn’t work either. She explored her family history, went to psychotherapy, confused acquaintances with friendships, frustrated her son, and in the end she made this film.

 

 

Some attempts were successful, above all family constellations, a form of group therapy I first did long ago, on exactly the theme this film deals with, and it literally changed my life. An act I had carried my whole life as the beginning of my not-belonging in my own family suddenly became an act of love, once I saw it from another angle. I think belonging isn't something you rush to question if you have it, so success, by that measure, is when I no longer deal with the question at all.

 

The real change came when I stopped expecting society to somehow 'give' me belonging by no longer seeing me as someone 'different'. Superficial encounters with random people don't, in the end, decide my sense of belonging.

 

A few years ago I had a minor outpatient operation. The doctor warned me not to lift anything heavy for a few days, and then, as I was leaving, she called after me, no shifting crates now. For a moment I thought, she's heard my accent and is probably picturing me in a greenhouse full of tomatoes. Then I waved it off. How much does it matter whether she thinks I'm a strawberry picker? Not at all. Now that helped.

 

 

I would say it's actually the other way round. The society I grew up in is rather suspicious of anything different. The collective keeps you warm, but it also keeps an eye on you. Dutch society isn't suspicious; it mostly doesn't care. People generally don't judge you, but they don't accept you either, because they're not bothered. In one place it's control that isolates me, in the other, indifference.

 

We are a society full of unwritten rules, we have codes of behaviour that everyone knows and nobody says out loud. For example, at my grandparents in Bosnia I learnt that when someone offers you something, you must refuse, then refuse again, and only after many rounds may you accept. When I came to Karlovac as a child, the ritual there wasn't as long. Once a neighbour told us, children, take a banana and go and play. All the children took a banana and left. I stood there waiting for her to start urging me. When after a while she didn't, because she was completely absorbed in conversation with my mum, I said, all right, auntie Katica, since you insist so much, fine, I'll take a banana.

 

Dutch society prides itself on having no code, which is why others often experience the Dutch as overly blunt and "too honest". People say what they think. At first this, to put it mildly, shocked me, it was cold! But I no longer take it personally, because it's really the same as our urging ritual, or the way someone back home will say "no problem at all" while thinking it's very much a problem, the Dutch are simply often (and sometimes unnecessarily) direct. I fled our society for the West, into what seemed to me then to be freedom. Into a society that values independence, personal boundaries and individual freedom above all. Thank God nobody in the Netherlands will judge me or control me, I thought at the time. And yes, here I am free of that control, but here everyone looks after themselves anyway.

 

While I was asking myself whether I could protect my child alone, in that big cold world, community became as important to me as freedom. So yes, I think it is permanent. But over the years I've stopped experiencing it as a problem, more as a position from which I can see both sides.

 

 

I knew my father's material; there were no great surprises in the sense of discovering something I didn't know existed. I've been working with those recordings since my late twenties. Dad filmed a lot, although when you add it all up, in the end it isn't that much. But the real surprise is that every time I watch that material again, and I've been watching it for decades, I find a new layer in the same image, a new meaning. The image doesn't change, I do. That's why I love working with archive, I'm interested in how memories work for us, how the same shot tells a different story at different stages of life.

 

 

He saw the film in full for the first time at the national premiere in Zagreb. When it ended, he hugged me and said: "You made a beautiful film, Mum, I'm proud of you!" And then he added: "So all that hassle wasn't for nothing."

 

 

While you're making a film, you're in a double position: the director who mustn't be merciful to her character, and the film's heroine who wants to be seen as a good person, a good mother, clever, likeable, and so on. It's strange, challenging, sometimes funny, refreshing, all at once.

 

But that double position doesn't end when the film is finished. Audiences often come up to me, after the previous film and now after this one, and say: I feel like I know you. But what they know isn't me, it's the character I created. That character is based on me, but in many ways she's exaggerated, adjusted, turned to serve the dramaturgical needs of the film. When my previous film was in cinemas, a gentleman stopped me at a tram stop in Amsterdam: I know you! I know your love life, I know where you lived, I know what you did. I laughed and insisted: you don't know me at all.

 

A film has to cut the truth of life, which is always more layered and more complex, into a shape that fits one story on one theme in about eighty minutes. You leave a lot out of a film because it would take it in a completely different direction, and yet those are often the big, important truths of your life. And to survive in that double position, what matters most are the people who support you in the right way, who can laugh at the character but want to help tell the director's story.

 

Without producer Magdalena Petrović of the Croatian company LEWA Productions, co-writer Jacob Gesink and editor and director of photography Sven Jacobs of the Dutch company Spacedust, co-producer Frank Müller of Germany's Doppelplusultra and Hanka Kastelicová of HBO, and of course without the main hero of this story, my son Waldemar, none of it would be possible.