ExileExile

This is a story of Xhafer, a Kosovo-born middle-aged pharmaceutical engineer in Germany. One day, he finds a dead rat hanging on his front door and quickly concludes that it is an act of racism by his co-workers. As time passes, his concerns turn to obsession, and his wife grows increasingly tired of her husband’s erratic behavior. Born in Kosovo, director Visar Morina fled from the Milosevic reign of terror to Germany at the age of 15. His 2015 debut film Babai, which depicts the story of a father who flees to Germany alone and his son that follows, earned him the Best Director Prize at Karlovy Vary Film Festival in 2015. His second feature film Exile doesn’t focus on identifying the abused from abuser, but on the structure and dynamics of the two parties. In the same way that Xhafer belittles and looks down on a Croatian janitor at his company, the dynamics of victim-perpetrator relations is not one-sided, and the film highlights the situational and contextual complexities of the matter. (LEE Jong-chan)