“Other America”: Goran Paskaljević explores exile and dreams of elsewhere

Rediscovered at the Arras Film Festival in 2024, then brought back to theaters by Malavida, “Someone Else’s America” tells the story of the fragile lives of two émigrés hoping to find their place on the outskirts of New York. Goran Paskaljević crafts a story that is both funny and painful, driven by characters who keep going despite setbacks. Beneath its apparent lightness, the film questions the American promise, displacement and the possibility of continuing to dream when reality stubbornly disappoints.

A re-release that rekindles a discovery

Some films make little noise when they first appear, yet their images linger in the memory for a long time. This one belongs to that quiet family: two years after discovering it in Arras, all it takes is a memory of its characters to recall their singular way of laughing amid hardship. Its re-release offers a chance to revisit a tender work, steeped in melancholy and attentive to the lives left out of the grand American narrative.

Here, Serbian filmmaker Goran Paskaljević reunites with screenwriter Gordan Mihić, known in particular for his work on “Time of the Gypsies” and “Black Cat, White Cat.” Their film takes a simple, almost modest form, without trying to turn hardship into spectacle. The direction favors details, silences and gestures, as if the paths taken by its heroes are sometimes better told through a hesitant gait than through a long speech.

A story of displacement

The title already announces a point of view: this is not the America of the winners, but the America of those who look at it from the margins. The film focuses on people from elsewhere, who left their country with immense hope and discover a daily life of odd jobs, cramped housing and the bonds they depend on. This attention to displaced lives resonates with the look back at Jacques Kebadian and Serge Avedikian’s journey in “No Return Possible” (1983), another exploration of the traces left by exile.

Alonso and Bayo, two dreamers on the margins

Alonso, the Spaniard played by Tom Conti, runs a bar-restaurant on Long Island. Bayo, played by Miki Manojlović, is a Yugoslav who gets by doing manual labor and lives in a makeshift room above the establishment. They do not really live in New York: they watch it from a distance, from a periphery that offers them little, but where they have managed to build a semblance of everyday life.

The relationship between the two men gives the film its central momentum. Their bond is not expressed through grand declarations; it takes shape in their routines, helping each other out and an ability to understand one another without explaining everything. Their friendship does not put an end to poverty or loneliness, but it makes these hardships a little less crushing.

A diverse community forms around them as they meet people. A young Iranian woman catches their eye, while Chinese shopkeepers tend to their minor ailments and Alonso’s blind mother keeps watch over the restaurant. Everyone seems to occupy a temporary place, and yet their acts of mutual support create a fragile refuge. The film observes this solidarity without idealizing it: it does not solve everything, but it helps them make it through to the next day.

Family, absence and impossible choices

Then two pieces of news disrupt this balance. Alonso’s mother wants to return to Spain to spend her final days there, while Bayo’s family decides to join him without consulting him. Back in his home country, his younger daughter is suffering from her father’s absence. Their aspirations now collide with their responsibilities, and the dream of a better life becomes a painful question: what can you still choose when you have already left so much behind?

Paskaljević does not reduce his characters to symbols of immigration. They have contradictions, comic impulses and moments of weakness; their dignity is revealed precisely in their imperfections. Returning, leaving or staying put are never obvious solutions. Every decision means losing something, whether a family bond, an old promise or the hope of starting over somewhere else.

Laughter as a way to survive

With Alonso and Bayo, the body becomes a language in its own right. Awkward movements, abrupt gestures and attempts to keep up appearances create a physical comedy that calls to mind both burlesque cinema and the theater of the absurd. Their figures sometimes seem lost in a setting too vast, like Beckettian characters occupied with waiting, starting over and inventing a reason to keep going.

This tone owes much to the performances of Tom Conti and Miki Manojlović. Their faces, postures and movements convey anxieties that words leave unspoken. Laughter often springs from an awkward situation, but it does not mock the characters: it gives them a way out. In this America far removed from the picture-postcard ideal, humor serves less to deny pain than to keep it from covering everything.

Whimsy emerges in the details of everyday life, whether in the raising of a rooster or in scenes where apparent absurdity sits alongside genuine sorrow. The film embraces this mixture without smoothing it over. A joke may precede a moment of grief; an almost clownish gesture may reveal a deep fear. At times, this way of answering misfortune with invention and resourcefulness evokes an energy close to the one Kusturica’s cinema associates with communities buffeted by history.

A direction poised between gentleness and vertigo

The cinematography by Giorgos Arvantis, a frequent collaborator of Theo Angelopoulos, gives the story a remarkable visual presence. The restored print highlights its colors and contrasts, while Andrew Dickson’s music accompanies the two men’s erratic movements. Moments of beauty arise without fanfare, such as the well scene, where the lightness of the direction suddenly lets tragedy surface.

This movement between laughter and gravity is one of the film’s most delicate balances. Paskaljević does not underscore every drama with heavy-handed music or explanatory commentary. He often lets the scene breathe, then leaves it to the viewer to gauge what it contains. This restraint is a reminder that exile is not an abstract idea: it is written into bodies, habits and interrupted conversations.

The story is not without its longueurs, and some episodes prolong the ordeal of its heroes without always deepening their journeys. Its tendency toward sentiment also surfaces at times. But this fragility is part of its approach: the film does not claim to describe a system from a cool distance; it seeks to stay close to those living through it. Its generosity may seem naïve; it is also a way of refusing to let despair have the last word.

Manhattan in the distance, the forgotten in the foreground

One image sums up the film’s quiet politics. During a funeral, the camera moves to reveal the towers of Manhattan at the top of the frame, with a vast cemetery spreading out below. The composition places the dreamed-of city alongside the lives that helped build it, without turning this contrast into an overt statement. The skyscrapers gleam in the distance, while the film gives its attention to the graves and invisible lives.

This perspective gives the American dream a different cast. The promise of upward mobility and freedom runs up against concrete borders, insecurity and separation from loved ones. The characters are not simply foreigners in a country: at times, they seem like strangers to their families, to their roles as parents or even to the idea of a stable future. Their displacement is as intimate as it is geographical.

The film also speaks of regrets, an absent child, a love that cannot come to fruition and a future that slips away. Yet it does not try to confine these wounds to a single explanation. They surface in everyday scenes, in a passing glance or a belated decision. This attention to how conflicts take root in ordinary lives echoes Magali Roucaut and Éric John Bretmel’s reflection on the nature of conflicts.

Borders and displacement also run through other cinematic works, in very different forms. In its coverage of FID 2025, the international competition spotlights Leonor Noivo’s work with “Bulakna”, reminding us how singular stories can shed light on the ties between people and their environment. Paskaljević’s film opts for fiction and burlesque rather than documentary, but shares an interest in lives that dominant narratives rarely look at.

Burlesque, another way of looking at history

The absurd is not the preserve of art-house cinema. It can also subvert the conventions of entertainment to open up another reading of the past, as shown in this article about the new Minions film, which revisits history and explains their absence from the world wars. In Paskaljević’s work, comedy does not turn history into a game, but it reminds us that a shift in perspective can make visible what seriousness alone cannot always express.

Cinema thus becomes a place where small lives resist disappearing. Alonso and Bayo control neither the space around them nor the events that upend their existence. Yet they retain the ability to support one another, to be surprised and to imagine what comes next. This fragile energy brings the film close to other cultural escapes, even in playful selections such as exciting games to look out for in December, where we find, in another form, the desire to carve a way out of everyday life.

Life on Long Island is therefore neither a triumphant arrival nor a simple failure. It is built in the gaps: a room above a bar, a shared meal, a job taken for lack of anything better, a joke that delays the pain. This America on the margins does not erase the scale of the losses, but it shows how people continue to inhabit the present despite everything. In this unstable space, the dream remains less a destination than a movement, fragile and forever beginning again.