NAVO Filmweek: Home Game

• Date: 19 June
• Time: 19:30
• Location: Theater en Filmhuis Dakota

What does war do to the people who didn’t choose it — but find themselves caught in the middle?
And how do you hold together a fragile world order before it truly collapses?

As part of the Just Peace Festival 2025, in the lead-up to the NATO summit, Movies that Matter joins forces with PAARD, Flora Filmtheater, and Theater & Filmhuis Dakota for a specially curated film series titled ‘NATO Film Week’, highlighting the complexity of war and the challenge of maintaining peace.

Four very different films, offering entirely different perspectives — together forming one powerful reflection of our time.

About the Film

Acclaimed filmmaker Lidija Zelovic has been documenting her displaced family in the Netherlands since 1993, when they fled war-torn Sarajevo. With a sharp sense of irony and a distinctive voice, she explores their lives in exile. Home Game is a film essay that lays bare the inner duality all migrants live with: what is "home"? At the same time, the film draws attention to political and social developments in the Netherlands that Zelovic recognizes from her shattered homeland, the former Yugoslavia.

Drawing from decades of family footage, Zelovic weaves together intimate home scenes with snapshots of Dutch political life. Sunday debates on politics and football with her parents and brother, her son growing up, holidays in Bosnia — all unfold alongside the rising unrest in Dutch society: political assassinations, government discrimination scandals, growing polarization, and the increasing normalization of far-right politics at the heart of power.

Home Game offers a sometimes humorous, often confronting, and always sincere glimpse into Zelovic’s life — a mirror to the current political climate in the Netherlands and beyond. The documentary won both the Dutch Focus Competition and the Audience Award at the latest Movies that Matter Festival.

Post-Screening Talk

Following the film, there will be a post-screening conversation with Home Game filmmaker Lidija Zelovic. Together with the audience, we’ll dive deeper into the film and its themes. As her grandmother says in the documentary:
"There is peace — until a shot is fired. But once the shot is fired, you realize the war began much earlier."

How do we recognize when a war truly begins? Is there a single moment? And — could war ever happen in the Netherlands?

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