The absurd walks in through the front door, and the house itself becomes the protagonist. In her debut film, multidisciplinary artist Matea Radic draws on hand-drawn animation, family photographs, and a distinctly personal sense of irony to return to war-scarred Sarajevo, the city she left behind as a child. What does attachment really mean?
A roughly drawn animation, in a middle ground between the confident strokes of art naïf and the more deliberate crudeness of a certain school of independent comics. This vision, hovering between the sweet and the grotesque, is used by the filmmaker to explore the contradictions and fears of living in or visiting Sarajevo, her hometown. This exploration takes place within a realm of a never obvious symbolic, associative surrealism. Tomatoes appear and recur, for example. Snails, bombs, and shifting spaces are all central elements of this film. But none of these elements carries a single, oppressive meaning. With a dark and disconcerting humor that is far warmer than nihilistic, Paradaïz invites us to rethink the concept of home. (Vasco Muralha)
