Sevdah is a feeling of life imbued with melancholy, yearning, and beautiful sorrow, expressed in its purest form through the sevdalinka. This unique song-form, which has been alive over 400 years in Bosnia, is often compared with fado or blues.
In Bosnia, sevdah is as important as life, love, death, happiness, sorrow… and probably because it is so familiar and close to everyone, everyone in Bosnia will provide a different definition. Instead of aiming to define sevdah, this film is evoking that feeling through stories, music and pictures. Different people will bring stories to film, but three of them carry three basic film lines. These people are Farah, Damir and Marina. The writer, the musician and the director.
The death of their mutual friend, writer and sevdalinka fan, Farah, has brought musician Damir and director Marina together. Trying to deal with their own loss and grief, they decided to create a film about sevdah. Farah’s passionate stories about sevdah, became inspiration and guide for their journey through Bosnia.
During that journey, they are discovering emotional echoes of Bosnia’s tradition, recent tragic past and present in the souls of the people they meet. Together they travel through the world of sevdah, a place that doesn’t exist in the material, apparent world, but as a spiritual space of people who live and feel sevdah, create and sing sevdalinka songs.
They create this film as an emotional, musical, lyrical and visual journey through the soul of Bosnia, through their own emotions and memories.