Riflessione sul film:

What does it mean for a factory to be part of the identity of a place? That it has stood there for more than a hundred years, that countless lives are connected to it, that the parents and grandparents of local residents worked there, that a community grew out of its existence, and, at the same time, so did illness? In Anhovo, the boundary between nature and industry was blurred long ago. The factory does not merely stand beside the Soča River; in a way, it has become part of the entire valley: in the dust on the roofs, in the soil, in the fruit, in the air, in people’s lungs, in the names on gravestones. This is also why it is difficult to speak of a simple opposition between the factory and nature, between those who are “for” and those who are “against”. What, in fact, are we protecting when we speak of heritage? A building, jobs, the memory of generations who found their livelihood there – or also a way of life that came at a price? And who has the right to decide when that price is too high?

Asbestos reminds us of this with unusual cruelty: something that was once part of everyday life and progress returns decades later as disease. The past, then, is not really the past. It still lives on in bodies, in family stories and in the memory of the community. Now the story continues with a different kind of waste, a different process, different promises of control. Perhaps the question is therefore no longer simply whether the factory should exist, but who should decide what level of risk is still acceptable for a community. And also: where does pollution go when we remove it from our own environment? Across the border, into another valley, to other people? If the answer to an environmental problem is simply to move production elsewhere, then the problem has not disappeared; it has only changed its address.

This is precisely where the community and its voice become important. Change often begins only where someone demands it – where people reject the idea that a certain price is simply inevitable, and where an individual concern becomes a concern shared by everyone. But activism, too, has no simple answers: what does it mean to demand change when you know that closing one factory may mean losing something else that is equally important to the community?

The Valley of My Breath is therefore not so much a story about whether the factory should be closed or preserved, but about a much more uncomfortable question: how do we live alongside something that we cannot simply erase? Perhaps Anhovo’s greatest legacy is precisely this: that it forces us to think beyond our own valley – about air that knows no borders, about nature that is not merely the backdrop to our lives, and about what we will leave behind for those who will breathe after us.

Kaja Rakušček