A man leaves a country. In France, he becomes a father. And his country disappears. His daughter, the narrator, grows up amid anxiety and silences that speak volumes. How does one remember what once existed when words fall short? As a child in the Auvergne of the 1990s, she catches in fragments what is unfolding “over there”: the parcels being packed, the awaited phone calls, the conversations that break off.
As an adult, she returns to Bosnia-Herzegovina to reconnect with what she has lost: walking through Sarajevo, listening to those who stayed, reclaiming a language that people stopped speaking to her. She gathers memories and stories to make sense of the inheritance left by the war, even for those who lived it from afar.
D’un pays qui n’existe plus is a tender traversal of memory, in which the traces of History become a singular part of oneself.
