A novelist journeys from her home in Australia to Sarajevo, intending to write about the Bosnian War but immediately doubting those intentions, in multi-hyphenate Kuba Dorabialski's wry, convention-swerving debut feature.
By Guy Lodge
Plus IconGuy Lodge
Film Critic
@guylodge See All
As anyone who has made a great-author biopic (or even watched one, for that matter) can tell you, writing is among the hardest professions to make cinematic. The slow churn of ideas, the second-guessing and self-editing, and even those rare, exhilarating surges of creative flow are all part of a stubbornly interior, usually static process. Small wonder, then, that writer’s block is an eternally popular subject for doubtless empathetic, readily self-distracting screenwriters: Dramatic possibilities open up considerably when a character is doing something, anything, other than what they’re supposed to be doing. Yet in “Agata the Writer” — an elegant, slippery slip of a film about writing, yes, but also about immigrant identity, trauma tourism, vulgar art, theft of property and history, and strange, dissonant homecomings away from home — those possibilities also wind up perversely misbehaving.
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