SHORT DOCUMENTARY FORM KILLS THE DOCUMENTARY FILM

Our author Goran Radovanovic won in the past fifteen years numerous awards worldwide while with us almost nothing was known about this. In that sense, his most successful film is MY FATHERLAND (FOR THE INTERNAL USE ONLY, 2000) which traveled around the world, was at more than 60 festivals and won 12 awards. Radovanovic did not «hang» to the state resources (and in the full meaning of that word, there were none), but he also addressed the classical film producers abroad, where he got the funds for his projects. In that sense, he has learnt the craft that the other authors are just turning to. Such a destiny of his creative path was a reason due to which we have seen few of his films in our country.
In the past fifteen years, the domestic audience has seen only your films RESISTANCE (FEST 2001), CASTING (51ST Belgrade Festival) and ALL ABOUT MY AUNT (CHICKEN ELECTIONS) (FEST 2005). Why?

- Well, the only possibility was to screen the films right at this Festival. Unfortunately, THE SCALE MODEL was rejected in 2001 although it represented the Serbian film at more than 30 festivals where it won 3 Grand Prix awards. With the film MY FATHERLAND (FOR THE INTERNAL USE ONLY) is a bit different case: out of (with or without good reason) political paranoia, I did not even send this film to the Festival in 2000. It is interesting that someone remembered it and in the euphoria of 5 th October MY FATHERLAND was shown as the first documentary on the new RTS, only a couple of days after the changes …

Has the situation improved concerning the treatment of the short meter production in our country? (Competitions of the Ministry of Culture for the domestic production?

Nothing. In fact, the documentary film has been put into the short film production, according to the inertia of the previous times. In Serbia , a synonym for documentary film is short form.
And just in Serbia . Somewhat similar to the yoghurt: only in Serbia it is liquid...
So, in my modest opinion, a short documentary form kills the documentary film as its natural genre existence is a long meter form. However, with the appearance of the younger generation of authors, Boris Mitic, Djordjevic, but also with the pedagogy of Svetlana and Zoran Popovic (Centre for Visual Communications KVADRAT), finally something is changing there as well...

The heroes of your latest film CHICKEN ELECTIONS are authentic; they are your relatives?

- I have used the people from my surroundings before: my children's babysitter in MY FATHERLAND, or the cleaning lady in THE SCALE MODEL. The depth of the experience and the intensity of the emotions increase at a progressive speed in the encounters with the close people … Of course, there is a danger of drowning in your own privacy. But, it is exactly there where the charm is of the documentary game, the subjectivity and the objectivity, the private and the public, the manipulation in the best sense of that word….

How do you get to the international festivals and what is your advice to the domestic authors in that respect?

I take a cassette or DVD subtitled in English and take it to the Post Office. No joking, so far that was my only way that proved to be very efficient. However, with the latest film something unusual for me happened. Namely, a famous German film director and the director of the Berlin Film Academy, Reinhard Hauff, adores my latest film CHICKEN ELECTIONS 9ALL ABOUT MY AUNT) and he recommended it to the selector of Montreal, Moritz de Hadeln. It seems that it ill be shown there in September this year… So, as far as I am concerned, the recommendation system has started functioning...

You were a guest – lecturer at several Universities abroad. On what occasions and what are your impressions?

Of course and always, my films are the reason. It is for them that I am invited to give lectures in New York , Chicago and Berlin . What is most interesting for me is that the students evaluate the professors and not the other way round...

You also lead the trainings for so-called “peaching forums”? Why don't we have some of them and what can we do in that respect?

Nobody has remembered to invite the people who do that to come to us. Otherwise, everything is very simple: EDN (European Documentary Network) from Copenhagen has got a big experience in the region, also in Greece , in Croatia , and in Bulgaria ... Simply, someone has to invite the people from EDN... I am sure that after his successful festival, Zoran Popovic (7 MAGNIFICENT ONES) is the man who is capable of doing it in the shortest time... But, someone has to offer that to him, as well.

By the middle of April, the news arrived that Boris Mitic added to his collection of international awards for the film PRETY DIANA, the seventh in the row, the award from the Fifth Festival of the Film Art of the Middle and Eastern Europe “Go east” in Wiesbaden.

Your film, PRETTY DIANA was not accepted to enter the competition at one of the previous festivals. Can you compare the criteria for defining the contemporary documentary in our country and in the world?

We still insist on shorter forms of the documentary, which has been completely overcome in the world because of their television standard formats (52 minutes upwards). Worldwide, more and more feature-length documentaries are made as the technology makes it possible to shoot for a long time and yet in a simple way. The needs of the audience and the producers are such that they request stories as complex, rich and interesting as possible, which can neither be achieved nor can function in a short form. We have go used to insist on the same old aesthetics form the “golden age” of our documentary film, in the sixties that is based on a forced film poetry, on some long shots made in a static film language. Contrary to that, in the contemporary film, the story is more insisted on, as well as the strong characters that should develop through a long shooting and the film plot itself. On the other hand, our televisions do not show at all the foreign feature-length documentaries, and our authors have no opportunity to learn about the modern trends. At the foreign festivals I mainly watch such films.

You are very often a guest at the international festivals and your new film, UNMIK TITANIK has already been screened in Sophia, Ljubljana , Amsterdam , Madrid . I suppose you have also seen the films that the foreigners make about us...

I would never do a film abroad as it simply does not seem fair. I cannot really get absorbed with the story, I cannot sympathize with the characters, and cannot show their truth. For that I simply lack a lot of references and I think that a mistake is made by those foreigners who come to us full of prejudice, with the views based on what is seen from outside, who sometimes seem so fresh to us, but in fact everything is reduced to a banal simplifying or just a confirmation of their prejudice. So far, I have not seen a foreign film, for example, about Kosovo, that I liked.

We have come to your film UNMIK TITANIK that exactly talks about Kosovo....

I made that film quite spontaneously. On a New year I got fed up with staying in Belgrade and I went to Pristina with a camera. In a single night I made the whole film about the kids who were born and were growing up in a building almost never leaving it. Some high state officials, who left Kosovo used to live In that building, and about a hundred Serbs moved in, without any possibility to flee out of the town. They temporarily moved there for a couple of days, and stayed for almost four years, until the building was not attacked and burnt down last March.

Your film lasts 56 minutes. In your opinion, is the length the only reason why UNMIK TITANIK is not included in the competition programme?

I don't know. I am happier because it is going to be shown in a programme such as this one about Kosovo. I think that our Festival is somehow too ambitiously conceived, as it tries to comprise all the best from the world of documentary, short feature, animation and experimental films in just 4 days, which is impossible. In the world, the festivals mean some classification, some have narrow profiles in respect to the themes, so that there are festivals of exclusively documentary films, which within their framework are subdivided according to the themes, formats. Our Festival has really exaggerated and tried to pack it all in one basket.

The Special Programme about Kosovo, besides your film, contains also the Dutch film – The Brooklyn Connection, by the director Klartje Kuirijns and two more domestic films: TWO NEWS ON HOLLY VIRGINS DAY, by Slobodan Simojlovic and SEARCHING FOR THE TRUTH … WHERE ARE THEY?, by Jovica Krstic. It seems that this year for the first time, the competition programme is without the films that talk about the life in this Province.

Yes, last year I saw several excellent films about Kosovo at our Festival. THE BROOKLYN CONNECTION is a portrait of Florin Krasnici, an Albanian from New York, who for years and completely legally was buying weapons at the American market and sending them to Albania, from where they were smuggled over the mountain Prokletije to KLA. He was doing it undisturbed and now is proud of that. He openly talks about that. The director talks to him quite intimately, showing respect, admiration and then, showing even a fear. She is almost in the loss for words when Krasnici in the film tells that the same weapons will be used against the Serbs and the United nations forces, in case that the Albanians in Kosovo don't get the independence and that is the moment when the film becomes almost grotesque. The audience in Amsterdam , where I saw this film experienced him as a tragic and then as a tragicomic character. All affinities turned towards our Serbian side of the story and not towards his “patriotic” wish to help the guerilla soldiers in his fatherland.

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