Days and Hours

It takes a lot of narrative confident to film the mundane and tedious everyday life with understated realist tone and let the horrible past and emotional truth slowly seep through the everyday. Pjer Zalica did just that in his film “Days and Hours.” In the beginning nothing happens, a horrible thing that happened seven years ago was mentioned, the old couple’s late son was mentioned, and past relationships were mentioned. There was no emotional outbreak and no visible anger and pain, just a subtle sense of lost permeating everything and everyone. It is only when we realized that this is after all a film from Bosnia and these were Muslim there. The “thing” they mentioned in passing and the “thing” that killed the son was the same—the civil war of Yugoslavia. Without we knowing up, the sense lost permeated us also. There was nothing dramatic, just the inescapable everyday. We see everything starts to take on a deeper meaning with overtly being told. We start to see the pain the characters carry with them. And in the end when family and neighbourhood were able to embrace each other and enjoy life a little bit, we too are relieved and healing. The apparent simplicity of this film quietly communicated the horrible past, its bitter consequences and the hope and future a nation just starting to move towards tentatively. It is a great achievement indeed.