Hypermnesia – increased ability to remember certainevents, mostoftenconnected to affectively coloured states (extremely pleasant or unpleasant experiences). In life we often want to forget some unpleasant situations from our lives, but intensive emotions that follow our memories make it attempt more difficult for us...

The performance analyses the supressed in the process of growing up and in family relations of eight young people born (in the period between 1976 and 1986) in the same country, and today on the same territory they live in three different ones. Through them we realise how much social and political circumstances in this area influenced, changed, destroyed or preserved families.

Selma Spahić: Born in 1986. Earned a BA in directing at the Academy of Performance Arts in Sarajevo with the performanceSpring Awakening by F. Wedekind. She directed The Effect of Gamma-Rays on the Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds by P. Zindel,Victory by Lada Kaštelan, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Dale Wasserman, Lonesome West by Martin McDonagh, The Family M's Illness by Fausto Paravidino, How I Learned to Drive by Paula Vogel. Spring Awakening was awarded with the Special Prize of the Jury for directorial research at the International Theatre Festival MESS, and together with Lonesome Westat MESS received the award The Brave New World by the magazine Dani. Victory received the award for best directing at the 26th Theatre Meetings in Brčko. Lonesome West and How I Learned to Drive received The Key of Tmača for best performances overall in Bosnia-Herzegovina in 2009 and 2010.

(...) An intimate history. This is precisely what I was interested in. For the eight people we are watching on stage this history is necessarily marked by extreme socio-political circumstances. But I was still interested in intimate history. OK, historical facts are here (even though the sides in coflict treat them differently), but what was happening to you? And to you? How did you see it then, when you were five, ten or thirteen? I knew that by combining people from Sarajevo, Belgrade and Priština and dealing with their biographies I will acquire a political context. I wanted it to be present as much as it was in the lives of eight children or adolescents at that time. From their point of view, at that moment, without commentaries from the present. Those twenty years are the majority of life or the entire life for the authorial team. They left irreversible consequences and innumerable scars. But this is at the same time our life, the only reality we know while growing up. And those individual adventures, view of the world of the children growing up in extreme circumstances, that’s what interests me.
The flow of the process was hard to predict. A methodology of work did exist, but the material for the performance is eight lives, there are so many estuaries you can turn into. The selection of the material was a painful process, because really a few performances could have been made. To me personally the most complicated thing was to aestheticise and remain truthful to the documentary character. Nothing that was included in the performance is fiction. Neither were dialogues, which happened exactly like that or came out of the offered material for improvisations – journal entries, letters of everyday life of the families. It was important for me to preserve authenticity while at the same time using theatrical language so everything would be placed on a universal plane. To actors, the personal material during the process was turning into stage assignments and the distance they had to achieve was very significant. It is important not to force one’s own stance, emotion or commentary upon the audience. To leave them space to draw their own conclusions. That sounds simpler than it is, when you speak about the events that happened to you. One has to be objective within the scope of one’s own subjectivity.