Dom: When Home Has Many Names
From Sarajevo to Rimini, Massimiliano Battistella follows Mirela’s journey of memory and return, where belonging is scattered across places, people, and time.
Massimiliano Battistella’s Dom arrives in Venice as a compact, piercing road-documentary about return, guilt and the plural meaning of “home.” Premiering at the 82nd Venice International Film Festival within Giornate degli Autori – Venetian Nights, it follows Mirela, a Bosnian woman who fled Sarajevo as a child at the outbreak of war and has since built a life on the Adriatic in Italy. Thirty years on, now living in Rimini, speaking Romagnolo, the mother of two boys who still drinks only Bosnian coffee, she decides to cross back through memory and geography to search for her birth mother — not to settle accounts, but to thank the woman who brought her into the world even if she left her at the dom, the orphanage.
The film patiently reconstructs the origin story. Born with a leg malformation, ten-year-old Mirela was given priority to leave Sarajevo because her caretakers feared she would not be able to escape under shelling. She took another child’s place on the bus to safety and traveled with other 64 children to Milan, where a convent housed them. Under the Dayton Accords, those children were expected to return to Bosnia — many never did. Battistella doesn’t sensationalize this; he listens. The camera opens space for Mirela’s contradictions: the love for a homeland she calls beautiful, the enduring survivor’s guilt for leaving, and the sense that whether one stayed, left and returned, or left and never went back, the war has split lives into a “before” and an “elsewhere,” now accessible only through old photos and videotapes.
As a title, Dom is eloquent. In many Slavic languages it means house/home, and Battistella uses the word as a hinge. Home is the Sarajevo orphanage Dom Bjelave that safeguarded Mirela until age ten; home is also Rimini, where her children, her husband, and her mother-in-law — once her schoolteacher — form a second family. The journey east is not a repudiation of the Italian present but the completion of a circle: a recognition that belonging is layered, that home is many places at once.
Formally, Dom is modest and exact. Battistella favors an unobtrusive, observational cadence that lets encounters breathe: reunions with people from the orphanage, apologies offered for leaving, fragments of the city reclaimed by walking. The filmmaker’s restraint serves Mirela’s voice; when she rehearses the first meeting with her mother, the film adopts the rhythm of a pre-composed confession rather than a gotcha revelation. It’s an ethical stance: trust the subject, refuse to coerce catharsis.
The film’s spine is the ambivalence of rescue. The decision that saved her life displaced it, and the adult Mirela knows both are true. Battistella threads this with a quiet reflection on language — how dialect, Italian and Bosnian map different rooms of the same house — and with a tactile attention to habit: the Bosnian coffee ritual as portable homeland; the sea air of Rimini as counter-memory to the Sarajevo of sirens. Production is lean and rooted: Kama Productions (Italy) with Mess Sarajevo, an Italy–Bosnia collaboration that mirrors the subject’s hyphenated identity.
In the end credits, Battistella opens with a line attributed to Meša Selimović about lives that intertwine like scattered threads — an image that fits Mirela’s braided homes and timelines without tying them into a neat pattern. The film’s grace lies exactly there: in allowing threads to show, loose and visible, as evidence that survival cannot be reduced to a single address, or to a single language of belonging.
