Boban Kaluđer

Afterwater is a three-part film spanning fiction, documentary and experimental film aiming to study and compare lakes across the world and their hidden treasures: submerged settlements, failed utopias and collective dreams, the remains of past eras and the seeds of a hopeful future.

It’s like almost all is lost. Yet still they are here – abandoned bungalows, an artificial lake, dirty plastic bottles, lost donkeys and stray dogs, draining pipes running over fields of salt, deserted factories, statues of revolutionaries, concrete playgrounds covered with weeds, rotten fruit, folded T-shirts, pop songs, decades of forgetting, a single room with a blue tent inside. And it felt like a kiss.

Two men - one in the West, one in the East, brothers. In both places, life is muted, solitary, nondescript. Here, windows are painted, switches rewired and cigarettes smoked; there, lengths swum, boxing matches prepared for, transactions made. What is it that links these things? Winter swimming pools, the sound of a bell, a bullet passing through bone?