Dom Boraca

This modernist building whose large bay windows open onto the mountains could be a university. But, apparently, there is not a soul in sight – to the point that Ivan Ramljak’s static shots at first seem to freeze into photographs. And for good reason: the Communist authorities built the Memorial Home for WWII Resistance Fighters and Youth of Yugoslavia in 1974 in Kumrovec, the Croatian hometown of Tito, near the Slovenian border, but in 1991, eleven years after Tito’s death, this “Dom Boraca” was closed down. An empty swimming pool, a bare mattress: the poetry of ruins could emanate from the place but, as the film advances, the human presence it reveals is decidedly unromanticised. Microphone tests, the removal of green plants, a watchman glued to a TV film seems to be keeping watch over nothing, the still filled shelves of a deserted library… Are these presences those of visitors, inveterate Communists, “elderly” youth celebrating the monument’s title (a propagandist masterpiece unto itself), maintenance staff, ghosts, actors? The clinical precision of the framing, which espouses the architectural elegance, deepens the mystery and helps to confer a sort of Shining effect on the policy of the living-dead, between these walls. (Charlotte Garson)