At the Door of the House Who Will Come Knocking

An elderly man works exhausting hours alongside his horse in the nearby forests, but the monotonous rhythm of his solitary life hides a deeper wound.

In the heart of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Emin, in his twilight years, toils alongside his faithful horse. Through bitter cold and harsh conditions, he seeks solace and warmth in nature’s embrace and finds fleeting comfort in sharing his burdens with his only true confidant. A story about man and grief as a universal human experience that can be both isolating and unifying, in a film that blurs the lines between reality and imagination, fact and fiction.

KO CE POKUCATI NA VRATA MOG DOMA | Maja Novakovic | 2024 | Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina

FESTIVALS & AWARDS (SELECTION) 

Sheffield DocFest, 2024 – World Premiere, Grand Jury Award in International Competition | Dokufest International Documentary and Short Film Festival | Sarajevo Film Festival | Makedox

DIRECTOR’S BIO 

Maja Novaković (1987, Srebrenica) is a PhD candidate studying Sergei Parajanov’s poetics of heritage. Her debut, “Then Comes the Evening”, premiered at Visions du Reel (2019) and secured an Oscar qualification by winning at the Full Frame Documentary Festival. It received over 50 awards, was screened at 130+ festivals: Hot Docs, Sarajevo FF, SFFILM, Camerimage, Jihlava…, and made the Cinema Eye Honors nomination and Doc NYC Short List. She is a Sarajevo Talents and IDFA Academy alumna.

DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT

This is my first feature film, and it was shot near the village I come from. I first met the protagonist Emin (78) 20 years ago following a photography exhibition at a high school in Srebrenica, where I displayed a photo of a horse I took in a nearby forest. Ever since we met, I had a feeling of knowing him and understanding his reasons for returning to his village in the mountains, forest, and horses, after working 30 years as a miner in Germany. Emin hasn’t cut his hair or beard since he lost his brother, a hairdresser, in a forestry accident in the 1970s. As he says, he grabs the hair and the beard and cuts off what annoys him. He wanders through the cold landscapes to soothe his grief. In horses, he found solace – he wrote them poems and built monuments when they died. I wanted to portray his silence, and the inner world dominated by loss and grief…