MISSING SHOULDER

This film began with me overhearing a conversation between family members, who were discussing growing up in Yugoslavia, and having to remain on edge in social or professional settings, because it was impossible to figure out who was working with or for the UDBA, which was the secret police tasked with internal surveillance, suppression of dissent, political espionage, and control of refugee communities abroad. I didn’t want to make a traditional documentary, and I didn’t want to make a straightforward espionage film. I wanted to create something that merged fact with fiction, creating a strand of personal archive that interlaces with a fictional version of the paranoia that would have been felt by millions during Yugoslavia’s history. To do this, I trawled through family home movies and arranged fictional scenes involving my two sisters, my mother and my father throughout most of 2024. There are three reasons why I was led into this direction. One is the intense prevalence of the docu-fiction genre in our lives, through social media, self-mythologising online, and the proliferation of first-person narrative in all forms of art. Two, is the lack of docu-fiction in cinema and its ambivalence towards it. Three, is the never-ending flow of content that engulfs all of our lives. Missing Shoulder was designed to combine self-mythologising, with factual experience, and more traditional film tropes, in order to produce a docu-fiction film that operates in the realm of content consumption we currently find ourselves in. To do this, I used the tools of the current and previous age to present Missing Shoulder in a way that integrates it with the current language of video content and also reveals its artifice.