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The Land Within – Raindance Film Festival 2023

Reviewer: Maryam Philpott

Writer: Fisnik Maxville and Mathilde Henzelin

Director: Fisnik Maxville

Returning home a decade after the Balkan War ended, Remo is reluctant to leave Switzerland but the likely death of the head of the family takes him back to the rural village where he grew up, to his adopted cousin Una and silent mother who have lived on in his absence. Fisnik Maxville’s The Land Within, screening at the Raindance Film Festival 2023, is a ponderous experience, filled with foreboding but very little actually happens. With thousands dead or missing, the characters move through what Una describes as “a ghost world” as the duo seek news of relatives and try to reconcile past and present.

Documentary filmmaker Maxville turns in his first feature co-written with Mathilde Henzelin, The Land Within, a serious and grave movie about mass exhumation and the identification of bodies of local villagers known to Remo and Una before the war. The film manages to be both epic and ponderous, given chapter labels such as The Wedding and The Worm which pursue different bits of plot which includes trouble stirred up between different ethnic groups, the process of identification, the closing in of a wolf pack and a sexual relationship developing between Una and Remo as they tend to the family patriarch. But Maxville struggles to bring all of this together in a coherent frame.

A large part of that is the emotional connection with the characters, and while terrible, complex and intimate things take place across The Land Within’s two-hour running time, the audience remains firmly on the outside looking in, struggling to fathom character behaviour or how the pieces fit together. This isn’t helped by flashback sections in which the man now dying, Skender, is seen as a young fighter, frustrated by his own family situation and looking to cause trouble with his band of rifle-clad rebels pursuing a vendetta that Maxville gives to little substance to.

Maxville certainly has an eye for visual beauty and there are moments of poetry in his film including a moment when Una dances in the rain, the crisp shot capturing each drop of water as well as the slow rhythm of her movement as she embraces a kind of freedom at last. But the style overall is too disjointed, too uncertain of its focus to sustain the audience across it’s lengthy two-hour running time.

Leads Florist Bajgora and Luàna Bajrami are given a mammoth task to link together all of these complex subplots and while Bajgora as Remo starts well, suggesting the pressure of returning to a home he no longer wishes to know, for most of the film the character is a passenger. Bajrami has more success as Una, a former soldier crushed down by the expectations placed on local women who finds a slow rebellion forming within her that leads to an eventual liberation from her suffocating circumstances.

The Land Within is an ambitious film with too many things to say while its alienating lens never brings the viewer into the story.

The Land Within is screening at the Raindance Film Festival 2023.

The Reviews Hub Score:

Alienating

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The Reviews Hub Film Team is under the editorship of Maryam Philpott.

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