Mila Turajlic: The Other Side of Everything
I am biased. I have known the director Mila Turajlic for the many years that I have taken part in the Magnificent7 festival in Belgrade. And I have shared opinions about the films, we have shown at the festival – with her mother, Srbijanka Turajlic, who watches all films at the festival, and is the main character of the daughter’s film, that shows the courage of the mother, a university professor in mathematics, whose political engagement brought her to be minister of education, when Milosevic was taken down from power in October 2000. She was a speaker at many huge manifestations against the Milosevic regime.
The film, however, has many layers: It takes place in the fine home of the family, where there are locked doors into some rooms of the apartment, doors which were locked when the communists came to power at the end of the 1940’es. Another family moved in and an old lady lives there, when the film takes its start. A metaphor for the past.
But it is also a film, that questions what revolutions are good for. Srbijanka Turajlic is awarded and says – she has a lot of dry humour – that this is first time she has got an award for a failed revolution, referring to what happened in the country after Milosevic.
Asked about that at the Q&A after the screening tonight here at the IDFA festival, where the film is in the international competition for long films, the strong veteran activist said that of course something changed – we got rid of Milosevic. And asked if daughter Mila – as she says in the film that she wants to leave the country – can do something? Of course she can, we all can and should be engaged to change not only Serbia but also Europe.
The photo for this review/report is not one that I like, but it was what I could find. In the film Srbijanka Turajlic has a cigarette in mouth or hand the whole way through. I love to see her in the big apartment, I love to see her polish silver, I love to see her lying on her bed reading Agathe Christie while the phone is ringing, she does not care, but she cares for her country, she has felt that she should help the students in their protests, I love to see the dinner and lunches she sets up with classical bourgeois plates, forks and knives… the scene for political discussions.
I ought not give marks, I do it anyway, high ones for daughter and mother. I raise a glass for them and the film!
Serbia, 2017, 104 mins.
