Ana Pavlovic & Vladimir Tomic
All parents – and maybe especially parents like us – who were not born in Denmark, are often worried about how much the background and baggage we carry will affect our children, as well as how our stories and experiences will follow them throughout life. At the same time, we are aware that concepts such as bilingual, immigrant, second generation, third generation will influence our children in their upbringing no matter what. Children of parents with another ethnic background know that their parents come from another country, they overhear conversations and are also told stories at home about the parents’ past, about their family, about flight and about the homeland, but much of it is still intangible. Against the background of such fragments, they fantasize further – as children often do.
Cut-out animated artfilm “FABULA” examines, how children of parents with a different ethnic background experience the parents’ story of flight, migration and war. In the cut-out animated film, our daughter Vida take the lead role and tells our story from her own perspective, which raises questions such as: How is the children’s knowledge of the parents’ experiences manifested – consciously and unconsciously? How does their imagination connect with reality? That, for example, you mostly see your grandparents over Viber and have to fly to another country when you have to visit them? That you can’t quite communicate in a common language?
The artfilm moves between the near and the far, between child and parents at the same time as it addresses complicated issues in relation to whether the parents’ traumatic experiences can be observed in the children, and whether one can track and talk about a trans-generational trauma which children in different ways are processing.
