A Letter to Dad

The filmmaker tries to make sense of the way his father chose to die, opening up several boxes, all that is left behind. The forgotten photos, letters and home videos take the film back to the 1970s Yugoslavia, when his parents became lovers. But the journey through the years, to family members, lost friends and places, reveals the lingering horrors of the recent Balkan wars still tearing people and families apart. A film that, in the most immediate way, questions the individual responsibility of ordinary people caught in the winds of war.

“Keča’s father was a volunteer in the Serbian army in the bloodiest massacre of the war in Croatia, the siege of Vukovar. Asking questions that go a long way towards explaining the issue of collective guilt, he interviews his father’s friends and relatives who also volunteered to go to this slaughterhouse. They still stubbornly hold on to old opinions, perhaps unable or unwilling to admit to a different reality – and they didn’t have an easy life after the war either, on the contrary – but the director asks the right questions, and not only in a verbal way. His attention to detail in the interviews he shot, including those with his mother, reveals a brave attitude and the courage to investigate deeper than the words his subjects say. We see his father’s best friend in a little fishing boat on the Danube, fighting off bad memories through solitude on the river “which calms him”. And his uncle sitting in a spartan, threadbare room, chain-smoking and wearing his old army uniform.” — Vladan Petkovic in Modern Times Review

“What distinguished Keča from the post-World War II generation of the 60s, the post-Vietnam generation of the 80s, and perhaps from his own post-Soviet Union generation, is a lack of accusation. Here is a director looking for a truth he does not seem to have found before making his film. Indeed, Keča is reluctant to tear conclusions from the sometimes shocking accounts of the people he interviews. In that, his film differs from the inculpating discourse of other films exploring the past. Suffice it to recall the grotesquely devout mentality Andrej Ujica’s recent Autobiography of Ceausescu attributes to the Romanian people. If Ujica’s approach permits one to laugh in retrospect, Keča forces one to raise one’s eyebrows in astonishment. Reality is banal. There might have been a war, massacres, and expulsion but after all, it’s all about keeping one’s house, driving a car, raising a family. Why one might go out to kill people is a second degree question. In Keča’s film, it seems almost beside the point.” — Moritz Pfeifer in East European Film Bullettin