Human rights film festival
18 - 20.11.2016
Cinemateque of Macedonia

Film selector
​Petar Milat

18.11 | 8pm "Austerlitz" (2016)
by Sergei Loznitsa (74min.)
​


​The new film from Sergei Loznitsa Austerlitz, is a stark yet rich and complex portrait of tourists visiting the grounds of former Nazi extermination camps, and a sometimes sardonic study of the relationship (or the clash) between contemporary culture and the sanctity of the site. What happens when the memorial and the museological meet — when places of death and destruction are transformed into tourist destinations? Sergei Loznitsa's new film Austerlitz (which takes its title from, and enters into cryptic and compelling dialogue with, the final masterpiece by the great novelist W.G. Sebald) is a stark yet rich and complex portrait of people visiting the grounds of former Nazi extermination camps, and a sometimes sardonic study of the relationship (or the clash) between contemporary culture and the sanctity of the site.

9.15pm     Ilegalni Parnas - Book presentation by Bojan Babic
What does it mean to be a Foreigner?
Discussion with Bojan Babic and Nikola Gelevski Moderator: Robert Alagjozovski

“I have made a mistake somewhere in the past, and now I am lost in the wrong life“.
Sebald – Austerlitz

Since the beginning of wars in ex-Yugoslavia, there is one dominant feeling in our region – feeling of irreparable ness, loss of faith that things can get any better, historical pessimism that, during the time, turns into anthropo pessimism, loss of belief in humankind. Where does this feeling of dead end, this feeling of impossibility to make essential change in our society, in our lives, where does this phenomenon of, as Sebald wrote “lying under the low sky and breading through hole of a needle” come from?
Are our individual memories socially conditioned? Why do we feel expelled, eradicated, like we are emigrants, even though we didn’t even move away from our homes whole our lives? Are we expelled from our tradition, of from sense itself? Is literature a deep search for causes of subtle, unbearable, hard psychological conditions of characters, caused by historical circumstances, through which author, and narrator, and characters, and readers roam, until they hit the wall of historical silence? Does being an artist in society like ours today mean being an activist, or being an escapist? Do we have the right to live in Parnassus that we have built for ourselves in the middle of this muddy road of unfreedom and corruption? Those are questions we are going to talk about, without giving final answers.

19.11 | 8pm The death of Louis XIV (2016)
​by Albert Serra (115min.)
​


​Serra’s movie has been reviewed amongst the most beautiful, but also aesthetically most complex films, whose heftiness of the topic conveys layered messages and perfect acting game. The film begins at the moment when Louis XIV, the King Sun or the most powerful man in the world, is already frail. Serra is focused on the topic of the degradation of power through the human body. The biopolitical dimension of the film is highly aestheticized and visually subversive. Meanwhile, the most powerful man in the world turns into a bunch of semi-conscious meat, and this rough degradation is even more gruesome because the old man is surrounded by pomp and ceremonial protocol. Through this powerful film Serra powerfully enters the porous, entropic image of the modern world of the spectacle, that thrives on the paradigm of death.

20.11 | 8pm Havarie (2016)
​by Philip Scheffner (93min.)


​37º 28.6´N 0º3.8´E. An inflatable dinghy full of people, one of them waving. The camera pans slowly to the right and shows tourists on a cruise ship looking out to sea. The camera moves back, touches upon the boat again and then pans to the left, to the other side of the ship. The refracted sunlight bathes it in colour and a vertical ray of light separates the ship from the boat, to which the camera now returns. At times the image blurs; ghostly reflections appear in the water.

The following is heard at the same time: the rescue crew requesting via radio that one should wait until a helicopter arrives. A woman talking on the phone in France to her husband in Algeria. Later he speaks of a crossing. The Irish tourist holding the camera, ship employees, Russian and Ukrainian cargo workers talking of encounters with this refugee boat (or another). And of their world.
During the work on this film, images overtook reality. Havarie responds to this by condensing sound and disassociating it from the image to create a space of perception that allows the viewer to experience their own position without ever losing sight of the subject at hand: a cinematic coup of true radicalism.
Petar Milat philosopher and director of the independent cultural centre MaMa [Zagreb, Croatia]. He also coordinates the publishing and musical programme within the Multimedia Institute. Together with Tom Medak he’s editor of several socio-theoretical book series. The main focus of his own research is the nexus of biopolitics and normativity, applied to the history of socialist Yugoslavia and the Yugoslav cinema.​

Robert Alagjozovski (1973) Skopje based freelance writer, researcher, cultural manager, art and culture critic. M.A. in Comparative literature from Skopje University. Author of four books and dozen of studies from Philology, Film and Cultural Policy. Former President of the Brussels’ based Oracle network of European cultural managers and trainer at the Marcel Hicter’s European Diploma in Cultural Project Management. Member of Independent writers of Macedonia and of the editorial board of Sarajevo notebooks. He has been involved in many projects on cultural decentralization, interculturalism, regional or international cooperation. He has translated several important books from English and Serbo-Croatian into Macedonian.

​Bojan Babić graduated from the Department of Serbian and World Literature at the Faculty of Philology. He was a guest of several writer’s residency programs, festivals and readings. Up till now Bojan has published three books of poetry, flash fiction and short stories and four novels. He received award from the Borislav Pekić Foundation and were shortlisted for other biggest national and regional literary prizes. His book Girls, be good is about to be published in English translation by the end of 2016, by London based publishing house Glagoslav publications.

Nikola Gelevski is director and founder of the publishing house Templum (1989) (from the samizdat days). He is editor in chief of the magazine Margina and also of the comic magazine Lift. Gelevski is cofounder of the civil associations Kontrapunkt, Freedom Square and CEM - Citizens for European Macedonia. He is columnist in various daily and periodical papers: Forum, Utrinski Vesnik, Globus… Gelevski is and founder and editor in chief of the online portal Okno. He is author of 7 books and recipient of the award "Borjan Tanevski" for 2007 ("prominent columnist of the year").
The Human rights film festival is realised with logistic help from the Cinemateque of Macedonia.