On Tuesday, on the eve of the opening of Belgrade’s Beldocs Film Festival, festival director Mara Prohaska Markovic sent her condolences to the families of those killed in two mass shootings in Serbia in recent weeks, including one in Belgrade.
After a minute’s silence, Prohaska Markovic presented the films that will screen in the 16th edition of the festival, which runs May 10-17.
“Like an Island”
The festival opens with Mladen Kovačević’s “Another Spring,” about the 1972 smallpox epidemic in Yugoslavia, and will close with a film about Serbian rapper Dalibor Andonov Gru, “Gru Is Here.”
The program, whose recurrent themes include relationships and the importance of land, has a total of 105 films, among which are nine world and four international premieres, as well 91 Serbian premieres, spread across the two competition programs, and several sidebar sections.
Ten films will play in the International Competition Program, which are as follows:
In Sergio Guataquira Sarmiento’s “Adieu Sauvage,” the filmmaker, a descendant of the Cácuas, an almost extinct indigenous Colombian group, explores the feelings, love and the loneliness of Indigenous communities in the Amazon, and reconnects with his own roots.
Canadian doc “Bloom” from director Fanie Pelletier delves into the world of today’s teenage girls, observing their fascination with social media and their tortuous identity construction through self-representation.
Turkish-German doc “Forms of Forgetting” from director Burak Çevik follows couple Nesrin and Erdem as they talk about their relationship, which they don’t remember in exactly the same way.
Similarly, Swiss-Indian filmmaking couple Maria Kaur Bedi and Satindar Singh Bedi explore their own relationship in the hybrid autobiographical film “The Curse,” where the two are divided by addiction and are trying to save their love.
Continuing with the theme of human relationships – this time, the relationship with oneself – French doc “The Other Profile” follows its own maker, Armel Hostiou, as he discovers he has a second (fake) Facebook profile and travels to Kinshasa in order to look for his double self.
Karim Kassem’s doc “Thiiird” is the story of a mechanic who, in a village outside Beirut, realizes he not only has to repair his customers’ cars, but also the customers themselves.
German-Armenian doc “Landshaft” from director Daniel Kötter sketches the psycho-geography of a politically charged landscape and its inhabitants between extractive industries, war and displacement, following human and non-human actors as they make their way through the landscape from Lake Sevan to the Sok gold mine, occupied by Azerbaijan since the Karabakh War in 2020.
“Landshaft”
Courtesy of Syndicado
Following the theme of the importance of the land in connection to war, Slovak filmmaker Paula Mal’árová’s doc “Territory of Imagination,” having its festival debut at Beldocs, explores the representation of war in a territory of long-lasting peace.
In “Like an Island,” Swiss director Tizian Büchi follows two watchmen who secure the river that runs through a neighborhood in the city of Lausanne, Switzerland, and who, during their rounds and encounters with the inhabitants, observe and are observed, and bonds are formed.
Finally, in “Cisco Kid” Emily Kaye Allen follows Eileen, a young solitary maverick who forges a life among the remnants and lingering memories of Cisco, a desert ghost town in Utah.
“Cisco Kid”
Courtesy of Emily Kaye Allen
The Serbian competition program, a mix of medium length (“Aurora’s Deam” by Dragana Jovanović, “Boogies Demons” by Ivan Šiljak, and “I’m People, I am Nobody” by Svetislav Dragomirović), shorts (“And the River Still Flows” by Jovana Radenović, “Balls” by Gorana Jovanović, and “End of the Road” by Ivana Todorović), and feature docs (Alesandra Tatić and Eluned Zoe Aiano’s “Flotacija” and “Another Spring” by Mladen Kovačević) with three world premieres, explores the past while also delving into a wide variety of people’s more personal stories and histories in the form of dreams or careers.
Beldocs is the first doc festival in the world that will be presenting the Audentia’s Award, a cash prize of 30,000 euros, that has been instigated by Eurimages alongside a raft of other measures to promote greater gender equality in the European film industry. Twelve films made by female filmmakers across all sections of the fest will be vying for the award, including Anna Hints’ Sundance winner “Smoke Sauna Sisterhood.”
