“Has a touching sincerity.”

In 1991, Marko (Dejan Čukić) and his family of five suffer under Yugoslavia’s declining economy. War is looming. A visiting uncle encourages Marko to emigrate to a promised land that he has made his home: Denmark. There is not enough money to bring all three of his children over, nor enough space in the apartment of Marko’s sister, another emigree, which means Marko has to make the difficult decision to leave his two older sons home for the time being, while he and his wife (Nada Šargin) and young daughter Maja (Tara Cubrilo) build a life before the boys can come over. Both enter sham marriages to get a residence permit and they find jobs cleaning offices and, ironically, the elementary school Maja enrolls in. Making ends meet is like scraping an empty barrel, not in the least because they have to pay off their new ‘spouses’ for their services, but Marko, ever the optimist, firmly believes that he and his family can find their place in Denmark despite language problems and cultural differences. Maja, ripped away from the two brothers she loves, might be their downfall though.

Based on her 2018 short Maja, actress-turned-director Marijana Janković tells a story about the difficulty of settling in as a migrant, with many hurdles to overcome and the world not being as rosy as the stories promised. Janković should know, because Home is to an extent her own story. Like Maja, she left her home in current day Montenegro at age 6 for a depressing apartment in Nørrebro. Janković managed to find a sense of belonging in Denmark and became a respected actress, but her feature debut Home shows that she never truly let go of her origins and the impact her parents’ decision had on her life, let alone on the rest of the family. Playing Maja as an adult, Janković reflects on the difficulties of rooting yourself in a new place, with her ‘movie parents’ never adapting or learning the language and her brothers alienated or hitting rock bottom.

With a host of European heavyweights such as Zlatko Burić, Trine Dyrholm, and Claes Bang in the supporting entourage, Janković has assembled a strong cast that ensures emotional heft, although it’s Čukić and Šargin who deliver the film’s most powerful performances, masking the obvious shortcomings of young Tara Cubrilo as a character who has to deal with a conflict that her age prevents her from fully grasping (Janković herself as the adult Maja logically fares much better at this in a short amount of screen time). Despite the film’s social realist roots, Janković manages to introduce some flourishes from time to time, although moments of sweeping camerawork suggest a bigger film with more panache, clashing with the simple nature of both the story and the other imagery. A motif of the boys watching football reminds the audience of the film’s time period; a single line of match commentary explaining Yugoslavia’s disqualification from the Euro 1992 tournament (ironically, Denmark won the tournament as their replacement) deftly hints at the war raging in the boys’ former home country. Still, this is quickly brushed over and feels like a missed opportunity to extract more drama out of the main players, who no doubt would have been affected by their native country being on fire. The issue here is the uneven pacing, with this small leap forward in time in the film’s final act, followed by a bigger leap to an adult Maja in the 21st century, both feeling rushed.

Home tells a universal story; we all search for a place to call ‘home’, which is not always the place we live in. This is certainly the case for migrants, displaced by choice or by force. A poignant detail of course is its setting in Denmark, a country that has recently become more hostile to accepting people from outside its borders. But more specifically, the film is a tale of sacrifice, made by parents who try to give their children a better life by uprooting themselves. It mostly conveys this through Marko’s experience, and Čukić perfectly embodies the tenacity to go on but also the moments of despair when life deals him another blow. Yet the film could have used more time with adult Maja to give better closure to this idea of sacrifice and the impact a single decision can make throughout the lives of those affected by it. Although somewhat uneven and wanting a bit more about the impact all this had on Maja, Home isn’t a disappointment and has a touching sincerity because of Janković’s own background, but needed that little bit of extra room to breathe to lift it to a higher level.