“A quietly devastating and profoundly soul-stirring visual essay that captures the raw essence of what it means to be alive in a manner truly spellbinding and most unconventional.”

Just over a decade ago photographer Jimmy Nelson produced an acclaimed book entitled Before They Pass Away, in which he intended to capture images of indigenous and tribal communities, particularly those that were in danger of fading away due to the encroaching spread of modernization. Ethnographic photography and documentary filmmaking have never been more essential than now, especially in capturing what remains of the older generations, the people who are essentially the final vestiges of the past and who represent a simpler time. A similar sensibility can be found in the work of Maja Novaković, who shows the same affection and sense of urgency for the elders in her native Bosnia and Herzegovina, setting out to tell their stories as authentically as possible. In what appears to be a logical continuation of her short film Then Comes the Evening (both thematically and visually), she makes her feature-length debut with At the Door of the House Who Will Come Knocking, a film as beautiful and enigmatic as its title. The documentary follows an unnamed older man living in a rural corner of the countryside over an indeterminate amount of time, tracking his daily routine as the days begin to blur together, creating a poignant depiction of his day-to-day life that seems simple in theory but proves to be invigorating in practice. Beautifully subtle and extraordinarily poetic in both style and substance, the film navigates ambiguity with incredible precision and presents an unconventional but deeply moving exploration of themes that may not be clear at a cursory glance, but which prove to reveal much more than we initially would have anticipated.

Describing the precise nature of At the Door of the House Who Will Come Knocking is challenging since there aren’t many films quite like it. Perhaps a gentler, more compassionate version of Béla Tarr’s The Turin Horse would be a relatively good starting point in terms of pinpointing its style and approach, although even this feels reductive of the specific approach that Novaković is taking in constructing the story of a man as he goes about his life. Her camera is purely a tool of observation, rather than being used to construct a particular narrative. She seems to be singularly disinterested in weaving any discourse into the film, instead allowing the footage itself to take on a life of its own and shaping that to form an achingly beautiful document on the daily routine of someone that time has seemingly forgotten. This film is essentially a story told almost entirely through images – there are a few scattered pieces of dialogue, but they are mostly inconsequential and take the form of brief exchanges of pleasantries between the subject and his neighbour, rather than having any real substance. Instead, the process of lingering on certain images, many of which would not be particularly notable in any other context, indicates the importance and begins to weave together a particular set of ideas, which the director curates into one of the most visually arresting documentaries of recent years. Countless frames in this film could be studied as examples of masterful photographic composition, particularly in how they blend various elements to convey meaning. This is especially notable in the almost complete absence of the spoken word, which can often be rendered entirely superfluous when the visual component is as profoundly moving as it is here.

At the Door of the House Who Will Come Knocking may be one of the rare films in which the form dictates the themes, rather than the inverse. Through these stunning images we find ourselves becoming gradually intrigued, drawn into an enchanting world that the director carefully captures in vivid detail, and the film pulsates with a quiet, bewitching beauty that slowly reveals the underlying themes. While her motives seemed to be merely to capture the daily routine of someone living a much simpler life than the majority of us, Novaković slowly strips away the layers to reveal a poignant, affecting meditation on the nature of existence. The focus shifts away from simply showing the protagonist farming the land and interacting with the animals that serve as his primary companions, and begins to grow into a statement on the poetry of a simple unfurnished existence spent in isolation, and how this can be a beautiful and fruitful life even if a lonely one. There are one or two peripheral characters that weave in and out of the film (such as a young child whose relationship with the old man is not clear – he is presumably a relative, but he exits the film faster than he enters it), which allows the film to gradually transition from an observational study about solitude to one about the inevitable passage of time, which tends to be measured differently when we look at it from the perspective of those around us. It creates a curious and engaging set of themes that the film explores beautifully and with such incredible precision, allowing each detail to flourish into its meaningful bundle of ideas.

While it may move at a slow and measured pace, At the Door of the House Who Will Come Knocking is a film that rewards patience, since it is ultimately about the cumulative impact of sitting with these images and allowing them to develop into a poignant, achingly beautiful tone poem that touches on the most visceral emotions. We follow the nameless protagonist as he meanders through time and space, going about his day without seemingly paying attention to anything other than his immediate surroundings but gradually starting to reflect on the intimidating nature of the past. We soon learn this is somewhat of a heavy burden that he carries with him. A beautifully impenetrable testament to the march of time, this film is a melancholic examination of the human soul that is quiet but never downbeat, drawing us into an enchanting corner of the world that is barely touched by modernity, and where its only resident is a man who exists somewhere between nature and civilization, an ambiguous space in which he has found solace and peace, the likes of which are seemingly not available to him outside these pastoral borders. Simple in theory but extraordinarily stunning in how it evokes a particular tone and its visual construction, At the Door of the House Who Will Come Knocking is a quietly devastating and profoundly soul-stirring visual essay that captures the raw essence of what it means to be alive in a manner truly spellbinding and most unconventional.