The Load

Ognjen Glavonic's 2018 Serbian film follows a truck driver carrying a load from Kosovo to Belgrade during the NATO bombing of 1999. Vlada does not know what the load is and is forbidden to ask. As he drives he begins to understand both the country and what he is carrying. The film rests on real events: after war crimes committed in Kosovo, bodies were transported into Serbia and buried in mass graves. Glavonic had addressed the same subject in his documentary Depth Two; this film is the fictional counterpart of that research. The telling is extremely restricted. The truck, the road, petrol stations; there is almost no explanation and even Vlada's face gives little away. That silence is the film's argument: choosing not to know is also a choice. It screened in Directors' Fortnight at Cannes. Who it's for: those interested in Balkan history and in cinema about the ordinariness of complicity. Who it's not for: viewers wanting open exposition and resolution; the film states nothing directly.