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“The heart of the wise lives in the house of sorrow” is based one two well-known biblical stories about Jacob and Yona. The main character is Jacob, a young man in his late twenties. Jacob is trying to find his place in today's society and create a life-goal for himself, a mission that he can make himself useful for. The fact that Jacob is somewhat of an outcast in today's society creates an obsessive and unrealistic mission and goal in his life. Whilst working on his mission Jacob finds an “other world” in which he finds himself. This world, paradoxally, happens to be the cities' graveyard.
Six years after being bombed by NATO forces, Belgrade city still keeps some of the buildings as they were left by the bombs. Inside one of them, the same group of women that once use to clean and maintain it now gather together, acting and working again as if time had never moved.
Untitled”Red Star”,02:49,2009 In the work of Milica Rakic the emphasis put on creating a subjective gender self-representation is moved to a broader socio-political context. By using visual and audio archive to evoke collective memory of the ideologically coloured past, the artist questions the genesis of constituting social and gender identities and their interrelations. By bringing together a fictive informal conversation between a man and a woman and images of the political past, she puts an emphasis on a deep and unconscious connection between the usual everyday understanding/playing gender roles and the influence of socio-political and ideological systems of power. The dialogue from the Milica Rakic's video contains a certain conflict present between gender positions within the framework of linguistic discourse.
An intimate look at Gypsy refugees in a Belgrade suburb who make a living by transforming Citroën's classic 2cv and Dyana cars into Mad Max-like recycling vehicles, which they use to collect cardboard, bottles and scrap metal. These modern horses are much more efficient than the cart-pushing competition, but even more important they also mean freedom, hope and style for their crafty owners.
Every boy plays with them. But are these toys as harmless as they seem?
The narrator's last remaining motivation is to chose how he will die. He thus challenges various archetype antagonists of today's society to a series of absurd duels, but realizes ad hoc that all his potential opponents (the humanitarian businessman, the honest politician, the redempted war criminal, the hypocritical moralist, the passionate nihilist, the corrupted doctor, the ruthless believer, the romantic lover, etc.) have already been ridiculed by the satirical proverbs of his friend. His self-destructive urge keeps growing, until the final confrontation with the only worthy opponent - the enemy within... Introducing Serbian satirical aphorisms, the smart kind of humour which enraged Tito and the communists, ridiculed Miloevic and the nationalists and soothed our way through transition and the Eurocrats. Like it or not, you are also in there.
In the summer 10 years before this film was made, the Bosnian Serb army occupied the Srebrenica enclave. The East Bosnian town had been declared a “safe area” by the United Nations' Security Council. In the days following the fall of the city, over 8,000 Bosnian Muslim prisoners were killed and buried in mass graves. Women were deported to Tuzla. The international peacekeeping forces did not intervene to stop the executions and deportations. In April 2004, the International Criminal Tribunal for ex Yugoslavia declared the Srebrenica events of July 1995 a “genocide”.
CHICKEN ELECTIONS is a film about the contemporary society in rural Balkans. In this story an old Serbian peasant woman is trying to learn how to operate a used mobile phone given to her by her grandson, a local traffic policeman. Finally, when she somehow learns how to use it, she dies. Thus, this story turns into a metaphor of dying province and the absurdity of the development in transition countries. Chicken Election is funny, sad and beautifully ironic story about solitude, depopulation, about death before death.
Six friends. Each one, alone in front of the camera, tried to give personal identification and also perception of everybody else's identity. Story of 6 men becomes a story of 36 identities. Are they all real or they are virtual'... Or... Which one of them are real and which one is not? Do we actually know each other or we just know the image that we made about ourselves?
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