Best Feature Documentary
After a nerve-racking escape from their hometown Herat in Afghanistan, Nahid (15) and her family find themselves in the limbo of Bosnia’s borderlands. In her new and unfamiliar surroundings, the voice messages from friends back home offer Nahid some degree of comfort, but there is no time for nostalgia and no room for looking back. Nahid is fully focused on one goal: to get her family away from the misery of the refugee camp and into the European Union. Many of the attempts to cross the border, which everyone in the camp just refers to as going to “the game”, end with brutal pushbacks. As time passes and going to the game almost becomes routine, the voice messages from back home more and more begin to sound like distant echoes from a life left behind.
In these circumstances, Nahid meets Ferida (67), a Bosnian widow who lives close to the border and lost her husband in the Yugoslav Wars. As time passes, Nahid discovers that the cycle of war and loss connects her to the Bosnian borderlands in unexpected ways and the two women begin to recognize the echoes of their own losses in each other’s experiences.