WHEN YOU DIE AS A CAT
ZORAN MASLIC
Canada | 2009, 85’

SESSION 12
15th NOV | 19h00
Museu Colecção Berardo - Sala Polivalente

After the war in Bosnia, peot Goran Simic immigrates to Canada hoping that he could be what he was before. The road is bumpty, not only because of a different language and culture or because of an industry of importing people.
While he is struggling in his new life, the War keeps walking beside him.
“Making documentary WHEN YOU DIE AS A CAT I can only compare with the passing of a kidney stone. I am not saying that because it had no budget and it took years to be completed, that was actually the easy part.
War, immigration and the prolonged post-war infection by death and destruction were “places”, I never wanted to go, but I had to.”
Zoran Maslic

“After I buried my mother running from the
shelling of the graveyard,
after soldiers returned my brother’s body
wrapped in a tarp,
after I saw the fire reflected
in the eyes of my children
as they ran to the cellar
among the dreadful rats,
after I wiped with the dish-towel the blood
from the face of an old woman
fearing I would recognize her;
after I saw a hungry dog licking the blood
of a man lying at the crossroads,
after everything,
I would like to write poems which
resemble newspapers reports,
so bare and cold that I could forget them
the very moment a stranger asks:
Why do you write poems
that resemble newspaper reports?”
Goran Simic