Mila Turajlic: Cinema Komunisto
Young Serbian director Mila Tulajlic has finished her work on “Cinema Komunisto” that will have its international premiere at idfa in Amsterdam and its national premiere as part of the Magnificent/ festival in Belgrade January 25-29. The film will exist in several versions, for cinema and festival release, and for television. The director has made a fine website, see below, where you can find texts and wonderful photos, and a trailer for the film, of course. Here follows the text that will introduce the film to the idfa audience:
Leka Konstantinovic was the personal film projectionist of Yugoslavia’s President Josip Broz Tito for 32 years. In that period he showed Titoa total of 8801 films. Along with Yugoslav directors, film stars and studio bosses he tells the story of how Marshall Tito (1892-1980) gave form to the post-war federal state of Yugoslavia, while at the same time setting up a productive film industry for his country. With the state supporting filmmakers “no problem” was the standard answer for whatever a director needed – with soldiers serving their entire tour of duty as extras on war films, and in the case of The Battle of Neretva (1969) the blowing up of a real bridge to create an Oscar-nominated film. Tito followed these film shoots closely, watching one film a day in his private theatre. After his break with the Soviet Union, he invited Hollywood stars to come to Yugoslavia, and soon Richard Burton, Orson Welles and Sophia Loren were commissioned to participate in massive productions, often about the heroic struggle of Tito and his partisans against the Nazis.
“Cinema Komunisto” is told with clips from over 60 feature films, some great archive footage, mixed with the storytellers taking us back to bittersweet memories of old times, with plenty of funny anecdotes and remarkable details. With Tito’s death, the entire Yugoslav film industry crumbled, and a decade later, the rest of the country followed suit. Today, nothing remains but the old studio complexes, which are rotting away, and the filmed memories of a country that no longer exists.
