15 min
#film
Slovenia
When a space designed with love and care falls silent before it ever gets the chance to speak, dance enters it, revealing the tension between memory and oblivion and asking: what retains its meaning in a world where meaning itself is disappearing?
Space of Becoming is the abandoned shell of Sarajevo’s Dom Penzionera, a building conceived as a space of care but one that never opened its doors. Completed in 1992, just before the outbreak of the war, it was almost destroyed before it could come to life. Today, it remains a strange architectural monument to something that could have been, but never became. Once awarded the Borba Architecture Award, the building is not merely a setting in the film—it becomes its main character.
The filmmaker transforms the space into a stage where dancers explore its wounds, memories and unrealised future through their bodies. Their symbolic confrontation creates a tension between what is disappearing and what is arriving—with tradition and gentrification, authenticity and uniformity, memory and erasure. Rather than recounting the building’s history through facts, the film attempts to listen to it through movement. Bodies move through the ruins, inhabit them and briefly reactivate them. A space that has stood still becomes a space that is still changing.
15 minutes of memory, architecture and disappearing worlds.
I come from documentary filmmaking, where I have always been drawn to spaces that carry untold stories within them. When I encountered Dom Penzionera—a building in Sarajevo built with the purpose of care, destroyed in the war and never opened its doors—I felt that the traditional documentary form would not be enough. This space is simply too layered to be explained through facts alone. Traces of war, gentrification, tradition and abandonment intertwine around its boldly postmodern architecture. I wanted to explore these tensions through a form of expression that goes beyond words—through movement. I transformed the building into a stage, and dance became a universal language through which the silent conflict between what is disappearing and what is arriving with force could be expressed through the body—between memory and erasure, tradition and uniformity. The film is therefore not a historical account, but a sensory and symbolic encounter with absence.
Rebeka Bratož Gornik, avtorica
credits
Director and editor Rebeka Bratož Gornik
Choreographer and performer Daniel Proietto
Performers Anastasija Dunjić, Issa Osmić, Nedim Šuvalija
Contributors Dunja Krvavac, Irhana Šehović, Oskar Longyka, Tobija Hudnik
Director of photography Martin Klabus
Drone operator Sabina Hodović
Camera assistant Muhamed Pašalić
Make-up Hana Zeba
Sound designer Muhamed Bajramović
Audio engineer Borut Belančič (Studio Pianoroom)
Production Dani Arhitekture and RBG Film
In collaboration with Academy of Performing Arts Sarajevo, LINA and Creative Europe
The collaboration with the Academy of Performing Arts Sarajevo took place as part of the PLES VI course, under the mentorship of Emir Fejzić. The film features third-year students of the Academy.
Guest screening production En–Knap Productions