Landscapes of Resistance
Pejzaži otpora
DIRECTED BY: Marta Popivoda COUNTRY: Serbia, Germany YEAR: 2021 SPOKEN LANGUAGE(S): Serbo-Croatian SUBTITLES: English, German RUNNING TIME: 95 min
SECTION: International Competition
SCREENINGS
SYNOPSIS
Sonja was one of the first female partisan in Serbia and helped lead the resistance in Auschwitz. When we initially encounter her in LANDSCAPES OF RESISTANCE, she is a friendly elderly lady with a playful cat on her lap. This is the start of an exceptional journey through her memories of revolutionary books from her student days, her wedding to a communist, the resistance against the German occupiers and her torture after capture as a communist and anti-fascist fighter, right the way through to her escape from the concentration camp.
Archival material is conspicuously absent. Sonja also makes scant appearances. While we hear her voice-over, the camera travels to spots the stories could have taken place. A landscape is given Sonja’s voice: grass and trees, a crack in the wall, slates off an old farm shed, a pool of water, deer grazing in the distance, even the chimney that is still standing. Sometimes images are augmented by drawings and journal-like entries from Sonja’s granddaughter, who also wrote this film’s script.
BIOGRAPHY
Marta Popivoda (Belgrade/Berlin) is a filmmaker and video-artist. Her work explores tensions between memory and history, collective and individual bodies, and ideology and everyday life, with a focus on antifascist and feminist potentialities of the Yugoslav socialist project. Popivoda’s first feature documentary, YUGOSLAVIA, HOW IDEOLOGY MOVED OUR COLLECTIVE BODY, premiered at the 63rd Berlinale. The film is part of the permanent collection of MoMA New York, and it’s featured in What Is Contemporary Art? MoMA’s online course about contemporary art from 1980 to the present. Her work has also featured in major art galleries, such as Tate Modern London, MoMA New York, M HKA Antwerp, Museum of Modern Art Ljubljana, etc. Popivoda received the prestigious Berlin Art Prize for the visual arts by Akademie der Künste Berlin and Edith-Russ-Haus Award for Emerging Media Artist. Her new feature documentary LANDCAPES OF RESISTANCE premiered in the Tiger Competition of the IFFR 2021.
FILMOGRAPHY
The Guard (2011), Yugoslavia, How Ideology Moved Our Collective Body (2013), Mass Ornament #1, #2, #3 (2013-2015), Cabinet of Political Wonders (2015), Caressing Machine (2017), Freedom Landscapes (2018), Landscapes of Resistance (2021)
SCRIPT: Marta Popivoda, Ana Vujanović PRODUCER: Dragana Jovović, Marta Popivoda, Jasmina Sijerčić CINEMATOGRAPHY: Ivan Marković EDITOR: Jelena Maksimović
PRODUCTION COMPANY: Bocalupo Films (contact@bocalupofilms.com), Theory at Work (contact@theoryatwork.org) WORLD SALES: Bocalupo Films (contact@bocalupofilms.com)
