I am aware the film engages with pressing realities, and it is precisely for that reason that I do not approach the subject matter lightly. As we teeter on the precipice of profound societal change, the discourse around child education in the 21st century--within the frame of rearmament, demographic anxieties, low birth rates, and the re-emergence of populist nationalism in Europe--must be brought to the forefront. Even the concept of elementary education, the seemingly sacrosanct K–12 system, can no longer be regarded as immune from scrutiny. The future appears increasingly bleak; but neither mass-producing AI-simulated children nor teaching them to load rifles before cultivating their faculties of reason and curiosity will offer salvation.

​

In an era where the phone camera has rendered nothing sacred, when video footage emerges of paramilitary camps training children as young as seven to "fight" and "defend their nation," the public remains mostly aloof--consuming it as just another flickering broadcast in an endless scroll of passive witness. The stakes are now more urgent than ever. Outlets such as TIME Magazine, the New York Times, France 24, and Radio Free Europe documented these scenes, but inevitably softened their presentation, diluting the truth for fear of alienating readerships. The question that arises is whether such sacrifices are made in the name of freedom. My wager is that they are not. They are concessions to capital--specifically, to accessibility--where truth is shaved down in the editing room, and the most unsettling realities are left on the cutting floor, excised in the name of comfort.

​

This film is a direct response: a composition fashioned from the very remnants, the excised, the abject; from that which festers in the ruins and lingers at the margins. To achieve this, I made the radical decision to have children articulate vile, troubling things--not as a gesture of provocation for its own sake, but because it was, to my mind, the only method capable of arresting the audience, of shattering their anesthetized reverie. It was a decision not made lightly. But if the shadows are to be spoken of, then it is the shadows themselves that must be summoned into speech.

​

My film builds upon the tradition of Verfremdung (defamiliarization). I do not shy away from the discomfort, the unease, the profound unsettlement provoked by watching this work. As both Peter Watkins and Bertolt Brecht once insisted that theatre ought to serve as an assembly where ordinary people confront the reality of their condition, so too can cinema re-find itself--forcing both participants and spectators into uncomfortable awareness. Through the experience of Chockerlebnis, a deeper reflection is made possible: reflection not only on the unsettling content but also on the viewer’s own complicity in the act of spectating.

​

Any work that seeks to disturb, unsettle, and expose suppressed truths runs the gauntlet of misunderstanding. True unsettlement, when achieved in form and not merely in name, risks alienating audiences precisely because it resists easy assimilation into normative ideas and familiar comforts. Out of respect for my craft--and for the viewers--the "answers" of the film are not laid bare in lines of dialogue or a neatly packaged close-up, but rather exist as scattered picklocks throughout the film: keys left for those who wish to search the in "the ruins of great buildings, whose plan speaks more impressively than in lesser buildings, however well preserved they are" (Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama).

​

For this film, I worked closely with children from Průhonice, the village where I myself spent over fifteen formative years. I grew up in the same fields and classrooms as many of the participants--though in an era when the mediation of screen technologies had not yet engulfed our every gesture. 

​

What is spoken in this film--painful, at times almost unbearable--comes not from invention, but from personal interviews, municipal archives, state documents, fragments of journalism, scavenged between 2018 and 2024. This was present and articulated to the young participants as a means of teaching and reflection. Once these testimonies were recorded and re-enacted, shooting over a period of years, a distance was born: the distance necessary for recognition. The act of filmmaking thus became a pedagogical process in itself: the shoot was not merely a means of production but a site of reflection, confrontation, and transformation. 

​

All participants--non-actors who had volunteered their presence--entered into a compact of mutual discovery. It was not simply the act of embodying these perilous ideologies that proved revelatory, but the far more unsettling experience of re-watching oneself--of confronting one's own image, suspended in time, complicit in gesture. In this mirror, distorted yet painfully clear, the participants encountered not only the roles they inhabited but the fragile boundary between performance and belief, between enactment and internalization.

​

Why is this film important today? History does not adhere to the comfort of fixed moral binaries; it mutates, unsettles, and collapses the architecture of eternal victimhood. In the film, the Sephardim of Z. Veritić’s family arrived in the Balkans under the aegis of Sultan Bayezid II, only to face persecution centuries later under the fascist regimes of the 1940s, some of whose survivors, in turn, became complicit in the expulsion of Bosnian Muslims--Veritić’s paternal kin--during the Bosnian War. The project was also in part inspired from personal experience: one half of my family Jewish, unwavering in their defense of Israel; the other half Muslim, steadfast in their condemnation of it.

​

This story from my great-uncle, who fought as a partisan during World War II and later was involved in Vietnam, encapsulates this irony:

 

"I judge people by luck. I owe my life to the Americans. I'll always love them. 

Until the end of time: I'll kill Germans and love Americans. 

Except that now the Americans are the Vietnamese’s Germans..."

—Zuko Garagic, 13.04.2025​

​