At only fourteen years old, Marko had to witness the cruelties of war in his hometown. He lost his home in 2018 and had to move to several places in Asia, Canada, and France. His only way to visit his childhood home in Alchevsk, Ukraine, was through a digital miniature that he could only access using a virtual reality headset to help see the conditions of his home after the 4 years of war it endured.
Feelings were ambivalent, leaving him colours of memory, longingness, and anxiety, inside a pitch black room that had contained the miniature; which was the bridge that can lead him back home. Beneath the images that are successfully replicated, there are moments which made Marko realise about the life before what had happened: the conditions of his home with his late mother. Those said conditions, subconsciously, were behind Marko’s perseverance that led him to survive to this day. His days of youth were marked by the struggle of finding a place of shelter, furthermore his sense of belonging towards that it, to the point that his childhood home in Ukraine could only be defined through lines of codes of ones and zeroes, that projects into a visual that can be navigated within a digital space.
The reconstruction of the site in Rapture I – Visit (Alisa Berger, 2025) portrays several attempts to make sense of “home” inside the embrace of its emotional fragility, that emerges in it, a transcendental turmoil. That turmoil is felt through Marko’s attachment to the image of a home, one that is tied to a physical structure he can neither inhabit nor visit for an indefinite period of time. Between the emptiness and void of the world filled with imitations that represent forms, most people attach all their hopes to those forms that are willing to become their place of rest.
Marko doesn’t simply long for a physical place, but he does, too, for its affections, recollections, and the sense of belonging that gives meaning to what we call home. We often seek meaning through what can be sensed and felt, whether it be through homes, loved ones, or even something more abstract. For all those dreams, perhaps what matters most is our intimacy with the emotions that surround them. (Gantar Sinaga) (Ed. Vanis/Trans. Timmie)
Detail Film
RAPTURE I – VISIT
Alisa Berger | 18 min | 2025 | France, Germany
Official Selection for Docs Docs: Short!
Festival Film Dokumenter 2025
