SO UND SO / THIS WAY AND THAT

Video: c-vhs, colour, stereo, 10’, 1999

Script/ Director/ Editor: Adnan Softić
Camera: Frank Henne
Cast: Adnan Softić, Esma Softić, Sulejman Softić, Frank Henne

The film works of Adnan Softić are not easy to describe, as they defies the known genres of documentary and fiction. Elements of both interlock in an enigmatic manner, annulling each other. The films are held together by simple "autobiographic" stories, which again prove to be fictitious (or not, even so?). A methodical consciousness that also gives expression to the artist's broad artistic experience.
The often fractured ambiguity is, of course, also owed to the time and place of their creation: Bosnia after the civil war, which left nothing unchanged, credible. Only by applying this ambivalence can the film maker do justice to a reality, in which not only physically no stone has remained on top of the other.
Though methodical variety has a tradition in a culture that has experiences so many influences and superimpositions and so much suppression. This reflects a complexity, which (if we want to remain in the scope of modernism) is to be found in painting (e. g. Šeika), literature (e. g. Danilo Kiš), yet also in earlier cinematic works (by Dušan Makavejev, for instance).
It also corresponds to the level of reflection rendered by modern cinema, where the "strategies of authenticity" are questioned and the fictional seeks to renew itself out of reality, as practised by the Danish Dogma film makers. In this manner, A. Softić combines his specifically Bosnian experience with reflective means of expression, as he generally knows how to join the intensity of experience with a high intellectual standard.

Gerd Roscher