Through the Graves the Wind Is Blowing

In present-day Split, detective Ivan Peric dodges a career in tourism only to chase the deaths it leaves behind. Assigned to a string of unwanted tourist murders, he encounters indifference, obstruction and public scorn. His futile investigation mirrors a society still marked by post-Yugoslav disillusion, where bureaucracy buries facts and justice ranks below resentment.

Travis Wilkerson: '[On rejecting archival images in this film in favour of colour manipulation and digital effects, including an animated Croatian fascist flag,] I'm always wrestling with the question of what can and cannot be represented. Fascism is deeply overdetermined, in the sense of being associated with a specific set of iconographic imagery. I wanted to figure out a way to disrupt the monochromatic image that's predominant. So, for the 90s footage, I pumped up the colour saturation. That footage was already colourful, but I amplified it slightly. I was drawn to the idea that normally, older images would be in black-and-white and newer ones would be in colour, and I wanted to invert that. I asked myself what I could do to describe the Croatian fascists. Every time I looked at the Croatian flag, I wondered what would happen if I tried to [animate] it somehow. It became a way to make something present now.’

— Excerpted from Ela Bittencourt, 'Interview: Travis Wilkerson on Through the Graves the Wind Is Blowing', Film Comment, 17 June 2024.