At the heart of the documentary is the story of Lidija and her family, who fled Sarajevo in 1993 during the Yugoslav wars. Their departure, like that of many refugees, was sudden and challenging, with uncertainty and fear. Yet the film avoids simple narratives of victimhood. Instead, Zelovic uses decades of home videos to show the complex emotional landscape of exile. These recordings captured on analog cameras throughout the 1990s and early 2000s serve as both evidence and metaphor. They reveal how migrants document themselves to hold onto fragments of their previous life. As the family adapts to life in the Netherlands, their archive functions as a time capsule, a space where the past remains accessible even as the present moves forward.
One of the film’s central questions is that what does “home” mean for migrants? That question is answered not through abstract theorizing but through lived experience. Lidija reveals that home is rarely a single place rather than a collection of memories, relationships, cultural activities, and emotional attachments. For migrants, home becomes something carried within the self, yet also something longed for. It is both a reality and an illusion, both comforting and painful. The documentary visualizes this duality with moments of joy during family gatherings or holidays, and it’s surrounded by with scenes of cultural negotiation in the Netherlands, where Lidija and her family try to build a new life yet remains somewhat haunted by the old.
One of the film’s most compelling aspects is how it ties personal history to broader political change. As Lidija observes rising nationalism, cultural anxiety, and political polarization in the Dutch society, she feels similar conditions that preceded the Yugoslav conflict. This parallel is not presented dramatically but thoughtfully, as a reminder that “home” does not simply represent a place of safety. For migrants, even their adopted home can become unstable, forcing them to confront the possibility of displacement again. The film therefore reveals the fragility of belonging where a home gained can quickly become a home threatened.
Stylistically, Home Game functions as an essay film, blurring boundaries between documentary truth and subjective memory. The nonlinear narrative is built from personal archives; present day reflections capture the way migrants experience time. The past is never fully past it resurfaces through stories, holidays, or political events. By weaving old footage into new images, Lidija demonstrates how migrant identity emerges as a dialogue between temporal layers.
The emotional complexity of the migrant experience is further emphasized through the film’s portrayal of family. The Zelović family’s interactions show differing levels of attachment to Bosnia and differing experiences of integration. Older generations hold onto the homeland through traditions and nostalgia, whereas younger one’s experience home as something hybrid, shifting between languages and cultural norms. Lidija mentions in an interview that this place is her home, but it will never be the same as the previous one, which for her means her generational belt feels conflicted in this generational conversation. For migrants, home becomes an unstable constant when you are thinking about having it or not.
Nostalgia in Home Game is never simplistic. Lidija is attentive to the dangers of idealizing the past, recognizing that migrants often make the homeland more beautiful in memory because it cannot be reclaimed. She emphasizes that what migrants long for is not an accurate past, but an emotional and meaningful one, a version of home purified by distance and preserved in an ideal form. This tension between restorative and reflective nostalgia (as Svetlana Boym would define them) passes through the film.
What makes Home Game particularly impactful is the way it transforms the personal archive into a political perspective. The sum of recorded memories, like birthdays, family dinners, car rides, conversations become a form of resistance against repression. For migrants, memory is both a burden and anchor. It allows them to hold onto identity, but it also prevents complete assimilation. Through her family’s footage, Lidija shows that memory can create comfort across displacement, yet it also creates a permanent sense of in-betweenness. Making the person too far from the homeland to return, yet never fully belong to the new place. This emotional liminality becomes the defining condition of migrant homemaking.
Home Game suggests that home for migrants is not a fixed geographic origin nor a fully comfortable place. Instead, it is a shifting and often fragile construction shaped by memories, relationships, and the political climate of the host society. Home is something people build and rebuild, lose and rediscover.
Sources:
Pejković, Sanjin. "Displaced Film Memories in the post-Yugoslav Context." Contemporary Southeastern Europe 4.2 (2017): 89-101.
'When you start thinking about home, you don’t have one' | Home Game https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VicQOFsNw8k
The article was created as part of the UniVerzió program, in collaboration between the Verzió Film Festival and the Department of Film Studies at Eötvös Loránd University. Instructor: Beja Margitházi.