The Landscape and the Fury

We hear panting in the pitch-black darkness, hurried footsteps on leaves, dogs barking in the distance. We see men in yellow suits cordoning off an area, small groups finding their way in the pouring rain, a dilapidated school littered with abandoned shoes and medication strips—and on the wall a disintegrating alphabet poster still hangs.

Nicole Vögele’s The Landscape and the Fury, winner of the Grand Jury Prize at Visions du Réel, starts with a sequence of these impressions. Then the story unfolds. Two worlds meet in this border area of Bosnia: the world of refugees trying to get to Croatia and the world of the local people. The locals’ own experiences with the misery of war means they can easily imagine what these itinerant migrants have been through.

Vögele draws us into the lulling rhythm of this rural hamlet, taking her time to let the moving images do their work. The ominous soundtrack, meanwhile, and the testimonies of war—distant in time but still so close—go straight to the gut.