28/11/2024 - Eleven works have been selected, spanning feature and short films and including Iva Radivojević’s When the Phone Rang and Emilija Gašić’s 78 Days

Serbia is set to take centre stage in the Wild Roses section of the 36th Trieste Film Festival, unspooling 16 to 24 January 2025. Dedicated to women filmmakers from Central and Eastern Europe, this year’s line-up will be curated by director Stefan Ivančić - who’s also a producer and a member of the Locarno Film Festival’s selection committee – with a view to promoting new female perspectives hailing from modern-day Serbia. Past years have seen the focus fall on Poland, Georgia, Ukraine and Germany.

Put together with the help of the Film Center Serbia, the Wild Roses section will showcase 11 widely ranging works put forward by as many authors, some of whom have already established themselves within the European film landscape thanks to their participation in international festivals, and some of whom are ready and waiting to stupefy audiences with their new works. “Films by Serbian women authors are taking us back to exploring the Nineties, whether they’re still living in Serbia or living elsewhere but are trying to draw a definitive line under that period, exploring crucial events from the time in order to understand the present and the country’s collective traumas”, the festival’s artistic director Nicoletta Romeo explained. These movies offer up personal stories, private tales sharing facts, sensations and memories of a country which is still paying for an all too recent past of war and internal division, based on which today’s generations are having to imagine and build the Serbia of tomorrow.

The protagonists gracing the section will include Iva Radivojević with When the Phone Rang [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Iva Radivojević
film profile], a feature film which thrust her into the limelight worldwide, owing to the Special Mention she scooped at the most recent Locarno Film Festival. The film investigates displacement and the nature of memory - which is capable of eliminating an entire country’s history and identity – by way of a telephone call made by its eleven-year-old protagonist. Emilija Gašić will be presenting her latest work, 78 Days [+see also:
film review
interview: Emilija Gašić
film profile] - which world premiered in this year’s Rotterdam Film Festival and nabbed numerous prizes in European festivals - telling the story of three sisters who film their day-to-day lives during the war in Serbia in 1999, amidst first kisses and first disappointments, as their only respite from all the bombing.

Other established names in international cinema will also be gracing the bill, such as Milica Tomović with her debut film Celts [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Milica Tomovic
film profile], which was honoured with the CEI-Central European Initiative Award at the 33rd Trieste Film Festival, and chosen to compete in the Berlinale’s 2021 Panorama section; Ivana Mladenović with Ivana the Terrible [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Ada Solomon
film profile], presented in Locarno in 2019, and Marta Popivoda with Landscapes of Resistance [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Marta Popivoda
film profile], which has also taken part in dozens of international festivals.

The section will continue with two documentaries - The Other Side of Everything [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Mila Turajlić
film profile] by Mila Turajlić, which met with great success following its world premiere in the 2017 Toronto Film Festival (crowned Best Documentary Feature in the IDFA that same year) and Homelands [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile] by Jelena Maksimović, which world premiered in FIDMarseille in 2020 - before rounding off with four short films by emerging talents Tara Gajović (Shoulders), Jelena Gavrilović (Nobody Here), Maša Šarović (The City) and Tamara Todorović (Pink).

(Translated from Italian)