On a Friday at 10:36 in 1992, 11-year-old Lana receives a phone call whose implications will resonate throughout her life. Such is the hypnotic refrain that runs through Iva Radivojević’s second feature, “When the Phone Rang” (2024), presented in the Concorso Cineasti del Presente section of the Locarno Film Festival.

And it is a self-hypnosis; the call marks a double trauma for Lana, as she loses her grandfather and her country simultaneously. In a prolonged state of dislocation, Lana finds herself fragmenting her memories and history. To counter the effects of migration, she obsessively returns to the phone call to hold on to what she knows to be true — at a point when she must quickly come to terms with her national identity and home being confronted and renegotiated.

The result is a film that is as much travelogue as it is a reconstruction of memory, a film that rejects exceptionalism in favor of an amorphous form that attempts to communicate across geographical boundaries. While Radivojević does not hide the fact that the dissolved country is Yugoslavia, the “land that no longer exists” in the film remains nameless. She explains: “This kind of displacement happens everywhere in different iterations, like in Ukraine, Palestine, Sudan. I wanted it to be universal and to relate to every moment in time.”

Born in Serbia and currently based in Lesbos, Greece, Radivojević’s prolific output of short films, documentaries, and a feature-length film—“Aleph” (2021)—has long focused on themes of dislocation, fluidity in national identity, and travel. While her sophomore feature continues to encompass such concerns, “When the Phone Rang” marks the director’s first attempt to excavate her own history at a time when she’s found a place she wants to return to.