Englisch

The starting point for my film »RETREAT« was my interest in the new forms of labour migration which was going on in North Macedonia in the past 20 years: Thousands of young Macedonian women and men left their country with the aim to earn money in war zones in the Middle East in order to realise their dream houses when they return home. A protagonist in the film explains this existential need with a Macedonian saying: »If you haven’t built a house, you haven’t lived«. It was astonishing to see that Kumanovo, the second largest city of North Macedonia, was witnessing an excessive building boom at the peak of an economical crisis in the country.

In my father ́s hometown Kumanovo almost everybody has a family member who worked in the Middle East. I knew that when I started shooting the film, but I was not aware how deep the experience from the war zones affected the social life in Kumanovo on all levels.

Also our shooting was influenced by the traumatic memories from the war zones several times and had to be paused. Not only the protagonists in front of the camera were affected by the post traumatic disorder, we also had to struggle with the problem behind the camera as one of our Macedonian team members, who also had worked in the Middle East before, suffered a flash back while we were shooting the film. It was obvious that almost all of them who worked in the war zones struggled with their experiences from the war. This made the work on the film extremely exhausting, but at the same time all difficulties even strengthen the project as we all felt the importance of telling the story.

Because of my origins and my travels to North Macedonia, which has changed its name two times since my childhood, I have an insight into the changes on site. The stories are both strange and familiar to me, since I was born and grew up in Germany. It is this balance of closeness and distance that keeps the tension and which helps me to find the stories and to reflect them from different perspectives.

RETREAT reveals the turmoil and contradictions of the world in which the protagonists live and also raises questions about the way of life in the western world and the effects on those forms of labour migration in the Global South. I wondered whether this new forms of labour migration are indicating a change in values and I wanted to find out to what extent the living and working conditions in a small country like North Macedonia can indicate new parameters of labour and work in a global way.