‘Dwelling Among the Gods’ Review: A Harrowing Modern-Day ‘Antigone’ Set Against the Migrant Crisis in Belgrade
Where there was dignity in life there should be dignity in death. So teaches “Antigone.” Sophocles’ Greek tragedy, wherein a young woman holds her own against a tyrant ruler who refuses to bury one of her brothers, endures precisely because its themes remain relevant. Set against the backdrop of the migrant crisis in Serbia, Vuk Rsumovic’s “Dwelling Among the Gods” calls up that archetypal figure to mount a powerful, empathetic portrait of an Afghan woman’s plight in modern-day Serbia, to do right by her brother, her family and herself.
“When we left Afghanistan,” a man tells Nikola (Nikola Ristanovski), a Serbian Farsi translator who’s tasked with helping migrants making their way through Belgrade, “we thought in Europe they would treat us humanely.” The earnestness of the plea, laced with the cynicism of its delivery, serves as an apt introduction to the world Rsumovic is depicting. This is a cruel and unsparing place, one where the wide-eyed hopes of those fleeing violence is met not with care and compassion but often with little more than cold indifference.
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Fereshteh (Fereshteh Hosseini), who eventually finds in Nikola someone who will patiently hear her plea, is searching for her younger brother. She’s come to Belgrade with her husband Reza (Reza Akhlaghirad) and her three small kids. But her brother Ali, who’d left her home before them, has been missing for a month now. She fears the worst. She heard a young Afghan boy had drowned around that same time. She hopes she can identify the body. She aims to give him — and herself, in turn — some closure with a proper burial. All of this she says between sobs, with her wailing punctuating this simplest of tales. This is a woman who’s seldom been heard yet one who refuses to stay silent anymore.
As it turns out, what would otherwise be a straightforward request proves to be anything but. One thing is clear though: She will not leave Belgrade until her brother gets the burial he deserves. Like Sophocles’ Antigone before her, Fereshteh is a towering, archetypal figure. She’s duty-bound to her brother even as she’s torn asunder by the demands her father (increasingly irate while still in Afghanistan) and her own husband Reza (increasingly impatient while stuck in Belgrade) make of her. She wants to do right by him, wants to avoid having him be buried in an unmarked grave. It’s the least she can do for him — and, as it turns out, the best she can do for herself, in the process.
The Kafkaesque ordeal that follows is bleak and infuriating. How can she prove she’s kin when she has no papers? How can she know it’s him when she can’t visually identify him? How can she claim him as hers when there’s a chance the body she’s crying over may not be the brother she’s mourning with every passing breath? With the added urgency that her migration elsewhere requires, Fereshteh finds herself stuck constantly fighting a battle everyone wishes she would just abandon. But she cannot let go of that anguish. It’s what fuels her, giving her the strength to finally examine how it is she’s arrived at where she’s at.
Therein lies the most intriguing proposition in Rsumovic’s film, which he co-wrote with Momir Turudic and was nurtured by the real-life events of its key central players: It is through crisis that Fereshteh finds her voice and embraces her own sense of agency. Suddenly, Fereshteh is pushed to think about the choices she’s not been allowed to make, to rethink the ones she’s been forced to live with and, perhaps, to learn how to stand up for herself in rooms where men constantly wish she’d say little and do even less.
Hosseini, partially fictionalizing her own migrant journey, offers a ferocious leading performance here. The wails and sobs and howls she’s called to invoke within her slight frame feel elemental. They tap into tragedies that transcend borders. Throughout “Dwelling Among the Gods,” Rsumovic shoots his actors — and Hosseini, in particular — with an eye toward a discomfiting, almost documentary-like reality. With DP Damjan Radovanovic, Rsumovic privileges single, static, long takes that keep our focus on Fereshteh as she processes, in real time, what it is that’s happening around her. We watch her search in vain for some clue in Nikola’s eyes as to whether it’s good news that will soon be translated her way. We witness her crumbling down as she bickers with her father on the phone, realizing how powerless she is even all those miles apart. And, in one beautifully framed moment, we see her finally letting out a cathartic howl of pain once the reality of what she’s been driven to do washes over her.
The film’s exacting cinematography, which rightly dwells on Hosseini’s face as she conveys a lifetime’s worth of pain and anguish, elevates what is otherwise a well-worn story of the perils men and women suffer when the dreams they have of better lives elsewhere run up against the reality of a world inured to their suffering. Whatever familiarity the film may hinge on — and no matter how pat its final moments may feel — Rsumovic’s feature is ambitious in its simplicity. It’s no surprise he turned to Greek tragedy for inspiration.
This is no mere exercise in “humanizing” migrants or in “honoring” their story. Instead, Rsumovic wants to distill the agony of women like Fereshteh (actress and character alike) with the righteous indignation their real-life tragedies call for. And in the end, deftly blurring the lines between truth and fiction, “Dwelling Among the Gods” offers a harrowing story of those robbed of dignity both in life and in death.
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