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This documentary by Serbian-born director Marta Popivoda is a mildly psychedelic drift into the horror of one womans deportation and determined survival

Much of this Serbian documentary uses a striking, mildly psychedelic technique: a super-slow dissolve between images that morph near-imperceptibly into the next. Cracks in rendered rural walls appear to shift and Balkan forest vegetation undergoes subtle mutations, as the films subject, nonagenarian Sofia Vujanovic, recalls her past in voiceover: one of Titos partisans, her wartime activities and subsequent deportation to Auschwitz. Its as if an ineluctable force history is moving through the material world, warping and reshaping it.

These tectonics operate on human flesh too: Vujanovics Auschwitz tattoo has slipped down her forearm as the years have gone by. Purpose still weighting her words, she recounts her journey into activism: she was attracted to communism by progressive classmates in the countryside; cherrypicked as a cell leader during the second world war because being a woman allowed her to escape attention; and then sickened by taking her first life, an SS officer during a raid on a supply train. Vujanovic was then captured, tortured and shipped off into darkness in Poland, with Czechoslovak railwaymen taunting the prisoners en route: Gas, gas! She thought they were being sent to work at a gas-processing plant.

Interweaving these enigmatic shots with sequences of Vujanovic in her apartment, overlaying them with diary extracts and sigil-like illustrations, the films director, Marta Popivoda, lets history subtly press upon us. Her attempt to draw a line to present-day fascism is a little clumsy, though: Popivodas mention of moving to Berlin with her partner and co-writer Ana Vujanovic as a protest against growing Balkans homophobia and capitalism is featherweight in comparison with the pensioners life-or-death resistance. Ana Vujanovic is Sofias great-niece, so making the documentary personal is understandable but as a pre-emptive warning to heed extremism in our time, it feels half-baked.

The older womans experiences and Popivodas unflustered conveyance of them speak louder. Where our attention is drawn initially to the beguiling images, it finally settles on the constant of Vujanovics voice; testimony to the strength of idealism and human determination to transmit through the decades.

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Landscapes of Resistance review an enigmatic meditation on a life marked by Auschwitz - The Guardian