Film festival

Curated by Fedor Tot (East Centre, University of East Anglia)

Broken Pasts, Fragmented Futures
Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav Film Festival at ICCEES 2025

Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav film history is, perhaps inevitably given the region’s 20th century history, one of continual disruption. These six films—three contemporary documentaries (both the result of post-Yugoslav international coproductions), two features and a short from the Yugoslav era—offer a glimpse into wider traditions of filmmaking. Of the three documentaries, Mamula All Inclusive commits to an activist mode of history, viewing the development of a luxury hotel in Montenegro through the lens of heritage memory, whilst the diptych of films comprising Scenes from the Labudović Reels displays the value of archives to enliven and enrich our memory of the past. Both documentaries take stories from a once-united Yugoslavia, and analyse their meaning for future generations. If one can be accused of Yugo-nostalgia, can one also be accused of Yugo-futurism?

The Yugoslav-era films are all centred around the city and urbanisation in the post-WWII era, a time when Yugoslavia’s population demographics shifted rapidly. Both feature films are romances but could not be further apart stylistically. Dušan Makavejev’s Love Affair is an aesthetically imaginative work melding essayistic documentary and breezy romance, set amidst a Belgrade perpetually under construction. It starts out as a light romance but quickly repudiates the idea of sunny socialism and escapism. The other, Zenica, from a decade earlier, appears to hark to a time of socialist realism, of simpler and more clear-cut narrative conflicts. And yet here too, we can find evidence of disruption, of narratives not quite adhering as tightly as one might assume. Living conditions form a source of anxiety for our protagonists in both Zenica and Love Affair: the short, My Apartment connects satirises those living conditions with wit and humour.

Schedule

Tuesday 10:45 and 14:45

Wednesday 10.45am, 14:45, 16:30

Synopses

    Scenes from the Labudović Reels

    Dir: Mila Turajlić; Croatia/France/Montenegro/Qatar/Serbia; Documentary; 2022

    • Non-Aligned (100 mins)
    • Cine-Guerrillas (94 mins)
    Film still from the reels filmed by Stevan Labudović during the Algieran Liberation War. Photo Credit: Poppy Pictures

    Stevan Labudović spent much of his working life as a cameraman for Filmske Novosti, Yugoslavia’s newsreel production institute. As such, he had a front-row seat to a significant chunk of the 20th century’s key moments. Mila Turajlić’s diptych of documentaries looks at his life’s work, excavating the archival record to discover a humble man from Berane, Montenegro, who ended up capturing the first Conference of the Non-Aligned Movement in Belgrade in 1961, travelling with Tito on the yacht Galeb as his personal cameraman, and filming for the Algerian Liberation Army in the ‘50s and ‘60s, sent by Yugoslavia to counter French propaganda (though in interviews he continually downplays his achievements).

    The Non-Aligned half of the diptych concerns, as the title implies, the creation of the Non-Aligned Movement, as well as a broad overview of Labudović’s life. Here Turajlić questions in part the purpose of creating her film: “Why dig out images which hardly anyone remembers?” her voiceover states, pondering the many liberatory heads of state present at the Conference who would later become tyrants, and that’s before we get to the violent breakup of Yugoslavia still to come. But the purpose soon becomes clear. Labudović’s images were recorded without sound, intended for other journalists to record their narratorly reports later, (mis)interpreting his work as they saw fit. A trip to the archives at Radio Belgrade, which separately houses the speech recordings, offers the chance to sync up the cameraman’s imagery with the spoken word: figures long gone are suddenly alive again, staking their claim for a fiercely independent, post-colonial worldview, away from the influence of the USA or the USSR.

    Cine-Guerrillas’s focus is narrower, with Turajlić following in Labudović’s footsteps in Algeria, starting from a museum exhibit featuring his old camera and uniform. From there, she tracks down and interviews surviving veterans who worked with Labudović, with Labudović recalling his own experience. Key to the question of his time in Algeria is the right to a people for their own self-image: the Laval Decree restricted Africans in French-controlled territories from filmmaking, and access to filmmaking tools was difficult to come by. Labudović’s presence was thus both an act of personal collaboration between himself and his colleagues, and a means for newly-independent nations to define their own state of being.

    Courtesy of Poppy Pictures

    Mamula All Inclusive

    Dir: Aleksandar Reljić; Serbia/Bosnia and Herzegovina/Montenegro; Documentary; 2023; 58 mins.

    The island of Mamula guards the entrance to the Bay of Kotor: some 200m in diameter, the Austro-Hungarians built a fortress built atop the island in 1853 to keep out incursions into the bay. In WWII, Italian Axis forces used the island as a concentration camp, torturing the local population in horrendous conditions. In 2016, with the fortress dilapidated and in need of renewal, the Montenegrin government decided to accept a bid to turn the island into a luxury resort.

    Reljić’s film follows the dwindling group of camp survivors and local residents who campaign against the luxury resort, returning year upon year to mark the camp’s liberation. Local politics, skullduggery and ideological betrayal hover in the background, but in the foreground remains the palimpsest of history, where a site of torture and misery has been paved over, renewed and renovated into an elegant, high-class experience set amidst a beautiful landscape. The film also turns to local youngsters, who prior to the island’s gentrification, would frequently use it as a quiet summertime spot, seemingly nonchalant about the spectre of history still haunting the place. Where does this history go once one memory has been replaced by another?  Mamula All Inclusive asks pertinent and timely questions about the presence of history and heritage in an increasingly lawless, neoliberal world where local concerns are frequently ignored (or even paid off, as some in the film suggests) in favour of luxury high-end experiences frequented by nobody in particular.

    Courtesy of Aleksandar Reljić

    Zenica

    Dir: Miloš Stefanović & Jovan Živanović; Yugoslavia; Feature Film; 1957, 84 mins.

    Starring: Rade Marković, Gordana Miletić, Mata Milošević, Stole Arandjelović, Pavle Vujisić.

    On the surface, Zenica is a rather dogmatic work of socialist realism. Set amidst the rapid expansion of the steelworks in the titular city in Bosnia-Herzegovina, and the area’s extreme modernisation and urbanisation after the destruction of WWII, we follow factory engineer Bora (Rade Marković) who has just moved to the city from Belgrade alongside his wife Divna (Gordana Miletić) to oversee the factory’s expansion. From here, a seemingly simple dichotomy emerges: the liberal socialist urbanites are to help educate, civilise and modernise the local peasant population – many of them Muslim Bosniaks – even as cracks appear in the couple’s relationship.

    But underneath that simplistic surface lies a melodrama of surprising grace. An early sequence sees Divna arriving into Zenica. She first witnesses the furious building of apartment blocks before the camera cuts to a minaret and cobblestone streets: the old Ottoman Bosnia and the new socialist Bosnia co-exist here in far more disruptive and fragmented ways than the dichotomies of socialist realism allow for. The couple see themselves as cultured Belgraders, and yet struggle to adapt to Zenica or to local custom, arriving as fish out of water. Hiding beneath the surface is a film about a cracked sense of regional and national identity, producing a surprisingly vibrant work.

    Courtesy of Avala Film Way

    My Apartment

    Dir: Zvonimir Berković; Yugoslavia; Short Film; 1963; 13 mins

    Starring: Liljana Gener, Ivo Kadić, Ivan Uzelac, Gordana Skok, Marijan Saridžić

    A young girl writes about her family’s apartment in this delicious satire of housing conditions on the outskirts of Zagreb. She writes of her old, cramped, pre-war tenement. Then she writes glowingly of her new post-war block. The new socialist utopia is being built for the working family… so long as you don’t focus too closely on the details. And director Zvonimir Berković focuses on quite a few details: audio is restricted to a few sound effects and the young girl’s voiceover, ensuring that the gags themselves are largely silent.

    Love Affair, or the Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator

    Dir: Dušan Makavejev; Yugoslavia; Feature Film; 1967; 66 mins

    Starring: Eva Ras, Slobodan Aligrudić, Ružica Sokić, Miodrag Andrić,

    Of Dušan Makavejev’s astonishing first four features, Love Affair appears to be the lightest and frothiest. After all, it seems set on simply telling a love story, about two lost souls in Belgrade, where Izabela (Eva Ras) meets Ahmed (Slobodan Aligrudić) and the two immediately hit it off. Yet Makavejev throws in mock documentarian affects – an interview with a sexologist, and a visit to the mortuary to analyse the body of a dead woman who, it quickly becomes obvious, is Izabela. The awkward sterility of these segments clashes with the light breeziness of the romance at the heart of the film and the darker undercurrents sleeping underneath.

    Because this is also a film about a Belgrade attempting to come to terms with its own modernity. Izabela is an ethnic Hungarian from Vojvodina, Ahmed a Bosnian Muslim; the modern metropolis where the new multiethnic Yugoslavia emerges. She is a switchboard operator, he a rat exterminator (how sweet!): two jobs at the grubby end of urbanisation. Love Affair is deeply conscious of the way in which romance and sex is tied to wider ideological structures and to cinema; when Eva Ras tells the camera her desires and fears, she is recognising the camera’s importance to this relationship.

    Courtesy of Avala Film Way