D'un pays qui n'existe plus

“I carry a piece of the departed state within me. I am a chimera.”

A man leaves his country. In France, he becomes a father. And his country ceases to exist.

His daughter grows up amid silences and unfinished sentences. In the family home, the war is everywhere and nowhere: in the parcels we prepare, the phone calls we await, the names we whisper.

From childhood to adulthood, the narrator pieces together the fragments: the flavors of Yugoslav summers, the traces left in her language, the stories of those who stayed behind. Little by little, a porous, fragile family memory takes shape, one that everyday gestures, scents, and snippets of conversation attempt to bring back to life.

D'un pays qui n'existe plus ("from a country that no longer exists") is an intimate exploration of the legacy of war and genocide experienced from afar: what history imprints on ordinary lives and what must be invented to keep ourselves talking.