Desire Lines

DUTCH PREMIERE

An insomniac loner in Belgrade obsessively tracks his younger brother’s suspicious movements, only to realise that the mystery lies within himself.

Branko can’t sleep. Something about his brother seems off, but there’s no one he can talk to about it. Branko follows him through Belgrade’s passageways and parks, shadowing his every step. With each corner he turns, a terrible realisation looms – his brother isn’t the strange one. He is. Then an unexpected call from a forgotten friend draws him beyond the city, into an unknown landscape, where the boundaries between reality and fantasy dissolve, and everyone and everything has a story to tell.

SCREENINGS

Friday 6 November 18:15
Saturday 7 November 18:45

Director Dane Komljen and producer Nataša Damnjanović will be present for a Q&A after the screenings

TICKETS

Programme section(s): Out of Focus: Serbia | Cinema Current
Original title: Linije želje | Year: 2025 | Runtime: 107′
Country: Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Netherlands, Croatia, Germany | Language: Serbian, Slovenian, Arabic | Subtitles: English
Cast: Ivan Čuić, Branka Katić, Petja Golec Horvat, Rok Juričić
Director: Dane Komljen | Production: Nataša Damnjanović, Vladimir Vidić – Dart Film; Mak Film, Marletti, seriousFilm, Pipser, Flaneur Films | Screenplay: Dane Komljen, Tanja Šljivar | Cinematography: Ivan Marković, Jenny Lou Ziegel | Editing: Marko Ferković

FESTIVALS & AWARDS (SELECTION)

DIRECTOR’S BIO

Dane Komljen was born in 1986 in Banja Luka, SFR Yugoslavia. He has made three feature films, Desire Lines, Afterwater and All the Cities of the North, one documentary, The Garden Cadences, and numerous shorts exploring notions of the body, space, utopia and being together. His films were awarded at the Locarno FF, IFF Rotterdam, Cannes FF, Sarajevo FF, New Horizons IFF, Seville European FF, and shown at the Berlinale, Cinéma du Réel, FID Marseille, Toronto IFF, New York FF, Hong Kong IFF, CPH:DOX, Jeonju IFF, and others. His work has been presented at the ICA in London, Volksbühne in Berlin, Centre Pompidou in Paris, Union Docs in New York, Lagos Biennale and elsewhere. He is Professor of Film at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Hamburg.

DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT

It’s a film about walking, movement and shape shifting. What begins as obsessive stalking drifts into gentle wandering, an image of a solitary figure dissolves into a group portrait, night turns into day, a concrete city into a lush mountain, solitude into intimacy. Desire Lines draws a line between this reality and fantasy found in fairytales and horror films pointing towards the hunger for the unknown, giving space to both humans and non-humans to tell their stories, reflecting on the world where abandoned factories, overgrown monuments, broken screens, landline phones, mushrooms, stones and insects are all linked to each other. It proposes radical solidarity, inviting us to recognize and embrace the shared vulnerabilities among beings, objects and environments, imagining a more compassionate and habitable world.

Eastern Neighbours Film Festival

Desire Lines

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