The scars of war last long after the guns stop firing, and Serbian filmmaker Dušan Milić shows just how long in his new film “Darkling,” Serbia’s entry into the Best International Film Oscar race. It was showcased this month as part of TheWrap’s Screening Series.
Set in Kosovo in 1999, “Darkling” follows a family living in the region after the conclusion of the bloody war between Yugoslavia and Albanian rebels. NATO-led forces known as the KFOR now occupy the region and keep the peace, but only during the day.
At night, a young girl named Milica barricades the doors and windows of her house with her mother and grandfather, fearful of the dangers that they believe lurk outside their home even as the KFOR soldiers dismiss it as their imagination. Whether or not it is real is unclear, but the trauma of the war has left deep emotional wounds for Milica and her family, as the young girl tells her story in a letter to the world.
In a Q&A with TheWrap’s Joe McGovern following the screening, Milić said that the story was based on an actual letter written by an 11-year-old and read to the United Nations about the horrors she faced living in Kosovo at that time. Though the letter hit close to home for him because of his Serbian heritage, Milic also recognized the universality of this suffering inflicted on countless children over the centuries, whether it is Jewish children fleeing the Holocaust or the children of Ukraine today fleeing Russia’s invasion.
“This movie came out just two days before the war in Ukraine started,” he said. “But I was developing this film for a very long time, and I think that all wars are the same. You have people suffering in those wars, and for me it is always about that suffering, so I wanted to tell a story about a lost childhood, about a young girl who one day could have been the next Marie Curie but didn’t get the chance to be that person.”
Watch the full interview with Dušan Milić here.