Fabula

Director's Statement by Vladimir Tomic und Ana Pavlovic: "In the cut-out animated film FABULA we see and can examine how a child experiences the parents’ story of fleeing, migration and war. In the film, our six-year-old daughter Vida, takes the role of a storyteller. She uses her knowledge, experience and fantasy to narrate her story of how, we, her parents, experienced and escaped the war in former Yugoslavia and later met in Denmark. With the help of family photographs, Vida’s own drawings and her very own words in the form of voiceover, the film thus moves between the near and the far, between child and parents. At the same time as it addresses complicated issues in relation to whether the parents’ traumatic experiences can be observed in the children, and whether one can track and talk about a transgenerational trauma which children in different ways are processing. Her way of narrating raises questions such as: How is the children’s knowledge of the parents’ experiences manifested – consciously and unconsciously? How does their imagination connect with reality? All parents – and maybe especially parents like us – who were not born in Denmark, are often worried about how much the background and baggage we carry will affect our children, as well as how our stories and experiences will follow them throughout life. At the same time, we are aware that concepts such as bilingual, immigrant, second generation, third generation will influence our children in their upbringing no matter what. Children of parents with another ethnic background know that their parents come from another country, they overhear conversations and are also told stories at home about the parents’ past, about their family, about fleeing and about the former homeland, but much of it is still intangible. Against the background of such fragments, they fantasize further."