Milica Tomić, Safety on the road, 2007–2010 © Milica Tomić. 43 minutes

TEMPO Documentary Festival

9.3 2012

Stockholm

This year Moderna Museet invites the curator Edi Muka to create an art-film programme focusing on Balkan.

STOCKHOLM 9 March 2012 at 1:00-4:30 pm
Venue: The Cinema

TEMPO Documentary Festival at Moderna Museet: The Screen of Memory.

Tickets: www.tempofestival.se. Remaining tickets will be sold at Moderna Museet on the day of the screening. Please note that there are only 90 tickets.

Curator: Catrin Lundqvist

THE SCREEN OF MEMORY

Curated by Edi Muka

Films by: Bojan Fajfric, Sejla Kameric, Adrian Paci, Milica Tomic, Knutte Wester.

Borrowing from Bojan Fajfric’s reference to Freud’s concept of “screen memory” – a mechanism we use to suppress and forget important facts – I invited artists who in their work relate to the recent history of the Balkans, and use film as a way to deal with this problematic mechanism that affects how our collective memory is constructed. The selected films represent different ways of opening up hidden places of traumatic experience, leading us towards a thorough reflection on our human condition.

1:00 pm
Introduction:
Edi Muka and Catrin Lundqvist

1:10 pm
SEJLA KAMERIC
GLÜCK (2010)
Colour HD, 18’

Showing the pursuit of happiness as a survival strategy, this film is a potential remembering in which boundaries between the past, present and the future seem to erode. Glück deals with memory in a more abstract sense. It reveals Berlin, where it was filmed, to be a city that, by virtue of its own tumultuous history can accommodate memories from Sarajevo.
Inspired by quotes from the book Nebeski zarucnici (The Fiancés of Heaven) by Mirko Kovač, the essence in the film is not geography but a city’s mode of consciousness and spiritual climate, a zone where time exists in a different way.

1:30 pm
ADRIAN PACI
ELECTRIC BLUE (2010)
Colour HD, 15’30’’

In Electric Blue Adrian Paci tells the story of a man who attempts to secure the economic survival of his family in the chaotic collapsing state that was Albania in the 1990s. But the film is far more than a historical document. It grapples with primordial questions of humanity and of failure; with the impact of war and societal rupture on humans; with the yearning for an escape from poverty; with love, sex and passion. In this video, the artist manages to create striking and impressive images of the human condition that imprint themselves on the memory.

1:50 pm
BOJAN FAJFRIC
THETA – RHYTHM (2010)
Colour HD, 17’

The film is a reconstruction of a day during the 8th session of the meeting of the Central Committee of the Communist League of Serbia in 1987, from the perspective of the artist’s father. It was spurred by the fact that he was present at the session but was caught on camera sleeping. Perhaps it is a coincidence, but it nevertheless means that he failed to participate and thus, possibly influence the moment in recent history that started the dramatic loss of “a better future”.
This metaphor served as the artist’s entry point in coping with what Freud calls “screen memory” – the way of mapping certain problematic issues.

2:10 pm
MILICA TOMIC
ROAD SAFETY (2008-2010)
Colour HD, 40’

Road Safety is set in Srebrenica and deals with strategies of reconstructing the suppressed memory of two eras: the national socialism of the mid-20th century and the ethnic cleansing in the late 20th century.
The film is inspired by the creative act of producing a visual trace that opposes the politics of total annihilation. Through communication with the surviving members of victims’ families, a visual trace of their beloved – killed and gone missing during the genocide campaign – is created using the medium of drawing, in an attempt to re-establish the grounds for a politics of confidence.

Break 2:55-3:15 pm

3:15 pm
KNUTTE WESTER
GZIM REWIND (2012)
DV-CAM, 66’

Tracing a young boy’s path, from his teen years in post-war Kosovo, back to his childhood in a Swedish refugee camp. Back to a frozen lake and the moment which, once again, ripped his world apart. For eight years, director Knutte Wester has filmed his friend Gzim. In reverse, Wester reveals a story about friendship, loss and the need to fit in.