After Yugoslavia

“Would you agree that images of empty streets and houses, which had otherwise been bustling, suggest an unusual, otherwise uncommon absence of the person, the citizen?” This is one of Selma Doborac’s queries in...

Note “We’ll have to put an shot of the park there, the way it looked before, so that the difference can be felt,” says filmmaker Srdjan Vuletić while standing in front of the camera and pointing at the empty ...

In what is perhaps the most disturbing and moving part of Dubina dva (Depth Two, Ognjen Glavonić, 2016), a female voice narrates the events of late March 1999 in the village of Suva Reka in Kosovo, a province t...

When asked about the phenomenon of filming Yugoslav socialist ruins in an interview on his film Muzej revolucije (Museum of the Revolution, 2021), Srđan Keča elucidated it as “an excitement of discovering aband...

In his seminal history book and manifesto Town and the Revolution, the architect Anatole Kopp argues that the earliest socialist architecture stemmed from revolutionary ideals – seeking to change man by changin...

What is the pertinence of past events for the present moment and how can one open up history’s trajectory into the future? – We were sitting in Orșova, a small town in Romania opposite Serbia, where the Cerna R...

The aesthetic and political imperatives for nonfiction film in Serbia, after Yugoslavia, can be understood through the conclusion of Theodor Adorno’s essay, “The Meaning of Working through the Past.” He writes ...

Post-Yugoslav Documentary Films: Powered by Concerns At the time of a long, uneven, and still unfinished transition from socialism to capitalism in post-Yugoslav states, in the period of untreated post-war tra...

While some filmmakers use archival material to set a certain context for their stories and introduce documentation from the past (often without modifying the original footage), other audio-visual artists tend t...

The fall of Yugoslavia was a historical event of huge importance for the Balkans, but also for the rest of Europe and the world. Different accounts and explanations of how and why the former Yugoslavia collapse...

Yugoslavia was dismantled three decades ago after a series of deadly armed conflicts that encompassed all republics of the former state. Yet the question of the Yugoslav wars’ representation in contemporary doc...

In 21st century frames of war, where warfare is often waged remotely – via screens that guide unmanned missiles – there is a notable tendency for the perception of such wars to anthropomorphise the landscape it...

Introduction  Slovenian filmmaking, especially documentary, is characterised by often being “generationally” marked by auteurs who, in a certain period, push the boundaries of formal innovativeness and substan...