Introduction. Mirela is 40-year-old, Bosnian woman living in Rimini with her partner Kicio and her two children, ages 8 and 5.The health problems of her eldest son Denis leads her to question her own responsibility as a mother. This triggers other very painful questions about herself, about her own mother who placed Mirela in an orphanage soon after she was born. After a meeting with the director, Mirela feels encouraged to embark on a journey retracing the footsteps of her past. For the first time Mirela decided to return to Sarajevo, to the Dom Bjelave orphanage where she grew up until the age of 10, until arriving in Italy with other children following the outbreak of the war in Bosnia. It was July 18, 1992: a convoy of two buses with 67 children on board left a besieged Sarajevo for Italy. 47 of these children were from Bjelave – orphans or minors with problems – who, on arriving in Italy were transferred to institutions, like in Mirela’s case or given up for adoption.
The journey. In Sarajevo, Mirela meets some of her former companions from the Institute who remained in the city under siege. Her best friends Amela and Branko – who were important reference points for her during her time in the Institute – tell her their experiences. Despite the joy of having found them again, Mirela discovers an unexpected sense of guilt for having left her “Dom” or home in the English translation of the Bosnian word. She left her home and family when she was still a child and without having any say in the matter. But who determines what is “family”? Mirela did not choose to leave but neither did she choose to stay. She was certainly saved from a war that broke out in the heart of Europe and terminated with tragic ethnic cleansing and the dramatic legacy of today. She doesn’t know her mother, nor her motherland, but she is determined to re-establish that bond that was interrupted so long ago. She needs to retrace her steps backwards along a road barred by landslides, knowing that by looking directly at the point where her life collapsed (perhaps, even before she was born) will she be able to find herself again. Only then will she be able to embrace the pain which she experiences as guilt for having done something wrong, and finally be free.
Archive. On this journey, Mirela is also accompanied by archival images of herself as a child in the Santa Maria Institute in Italy, and other 1990s archives showing the Dom Bjelave Institute and Sarajevo before and during the siege, in an attempt to reconstruct memory. The archival images thus become the building blocks of an intimate memory yet to be constructed because it was suddenly interrupted. They are the bricks that will fill those gaps that Mirela talks about, that will help her define what she is missing, her search for her childhood, her mother, and Bosnia her homeland. Not only but the archival images construct a narrative by free associations that progress lyrically to form an intimate memory that dialogues with History.
Epilogue. Mirela is both mother and daughter, searching for her mother. Perhaps she will find her in a freezing winter in the mountains of the Republika Srpska, on the banks of the Drina when she travels to the small town of Foča, where she was born, to collect a copy of her birth certificate and perhaps more information. However things turn out, Mirela knows that the true legitimacy of “coming into the world” is not through a written authorisation but another type of acknowledgement that she owes to herself.