Canadian Premiere
In 1961, a solar eclipse brought Yugoslavs out into the streets, peering through handmade visors and screens to wonder at this rare natural phenomenon. There wouldn’t be another one before the year 1999, they were told. Who could know that by then, there would no longer be a Yugoslavia? Nataša Urban (b. 1977) revisits the conflict that tore her country and her childhood apart through the prism of her immediate family and friends’ often reluctant recollections, and pierces their webs of self-protective amnesia and willful ignorance.
Artfully conjured through poetic Super 8 and Super 16mm footage, some of it quite abstract, some metaphorical, the film is a fascinating insight into a side of history that is rarely explored. With intertitles carefully mapping out the course of Serbia’s nationalist, xenophobic campaign, a spare but evocative score, and sometimes rendingly painful interviews, it’s easy to see why Urban’s film won the top prize at the prestigious Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival (CPH:DOX) earlier this year.
DOX:Award (Best International Feature), CPH-DOX 2022
Norway
2022
In Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian with English subtitles
Animal Cruelty
Book Tickets
Missing VIFF? Check out what's playing at the VIFF Centre
The Art of Adventure
The unbelievable adventure story of how painter Robert Bateman and ecologist Bristol Foster drove a Land Rover from Africa to Australia in 1957, developing a love of nature to last a lifetime. An inspirational love letter to the adventure of life itself.
Agatha's Almanac
Shot over six years on vibrant 16mm film, Agatha’s Almanac is an artful documentary portrait of filmmaker Amalie Atkin’s octogenarian aunt, who has fashioned herself an endearingly simple and self-sustaining lifestyle on her Manitoba farm.
Two Strangers Trying Not to Kill Each Other
This intimate and candid film by a younger husband and wife artist team is a delicate and immensely moving dual portrait of two artists, husband and wife, together and apart, at that point in life when the end casts a shadow over even the sunniest day.
Image: © Manon et Jacob and Final Cut For Real
Credits
Producer
Ingvil Giske
Cinematography
Ivan Marković
Editor
Jelena Maksimović
Original Music
Bill Gould, Jared Blum
Director
Nataša Urban
Nataša Urban is a documentary film director and editor working professionally since 2005. Her films, such as Journey of a Red Fridge (2007)—which won the First Appearance Competition Award and was named as one of the Top 25 Audience Favorites at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam—and Big Sister Punam (2009)—which won the UNICEF Award for Children’s Rights—have been screened at film festivals worldwide and have received 40 awards. She holds a Master’s degree in Photography from the University of Arts in Belgrade and lives and works in Oslo.