Old Bridge, Black House

A woman's story told two ways. Maja Loncaric leaves her apartment one afternoon with a pistol in her coat pocket—a journey having to do with an ominous building known as the Black House. As Maja moves through the streets of Mostar, the present has begun to fracture, revealing visions of a woman in Bosnia's deep past whose son was taken for future service in the Ottoman state. In another timeline, Maja lives in a village outside Zagreb, Croatia. Increasingly desperate about the impending loss of her son in a custody battle, she flees with him and embarks on an irreversible journey. Throughout the day, she is haunted by her previous relationships with men and the dark forces that have aligned against her for most of her life. Old Bridge, Black House is a formally daring diptych that weaves together history, the workings of the psyche, and the hard immediacy of lived experience. Shifting between past and present, this powerful and emotional story explores how trauma is inherited and how its troubled memory lives on.