The aim of this paper is to map out the manifold narrativisations and representations of the complex trauma – i.e. trauma of the victim, perpetrator and witness– in the film The Load (Teret, Ognjen Glavonic, 2018). The film researches the story hidden behind the discovery of the mass grave on the outskirts of Belgrade while the cinematic forensic takes us back to 1999 NATO bombing of Serbia and the crimes committed on the ground during that time. Thus the film reveals the multiplied crimes: the massacre of the Kosovo Albanians committed by Serbian forces; destruction of the proofs as the crime someone should take responsibility for (memory politics and policy of Serbian government); and eventually the ambivalent reading of the NATO bombing as aggression/intervention that allows the exploration of the equally multiplied trauma.
Firstly, the analysis is focused on the film text – its distinctive subdued and restrained style close to Rumanian minimalism and reconstructive fiction – as the example of posttraumatic cinema and its modernist narration (Hirsch, 2004). Furthermore, it maps the ways in which, both, the crime committed against Kosovo Albanians by Serbs and the NATO aggression are reshaped in the cultural trauma (cinematic) narrative (Alexander, 2004; Kantsteiner, 2002) of the specific dialectics. The film makes the nation, or at least distinctive minority groups, face the troubled past and events as „the fundamental threats to their sense of who they are, where they come from and where they want to be". The Load as cultural trauma narrative deals with the multifaceted past believed to be the phenomena that "have abruptly, and harmfully affected" collective identities of all involved parties. Eventually, the film presents the chance for "working through" (Freud, 1911; Caruth, 1996; Friedlander, 1992; Felman, 1991) trauma by working back through symbolic residues (Lacanian objets petits a as the remainders of the past that set in motion the symbolic movement of interpretation) that the "originating event has left upon contemporary recollection". Facing the crime, the collective entity assumes new form of moral responsibility that changes its identity for ever, while the film allows this to happen to all – Serbs, Kosovo Albanians, and NATO countries. Serbian troubled past is portrayed in a way that instils the feeling that the crime in Kosovo is comparable with the Holocaust, as well as the NATO bombing is addressed as "undisguised genocide against Yugoslavs".
