Text from festival directors Svetlana and Zoran Popovic, Magnificent 7 festival in Belgrade:

The Magnificent Seven festival, created as a cinema holiday for numerous devotees of modern European documentary film, has successfully presented top achievements and the most significant authors of the contemporary European documentary scene for the past 20 years. This year, certainly one of the most turbulent in the last few decades in Serbia, the entire culture suffered unexpected blows from the institutions that are in charge of nurturing, encouraging and developing it, and thus the festival found itself under the attack of those illegal and undeclared measures of repression, discrimination and elimination. First of all, the elimination of superb culture as too subversive and dangerous for the dark order now nakedly based on brutality and primitivism.

Since its first edition, The Magnificent Seven festival has been  dedicated to the mission of presenting high-quality cinema documentaries that helped us to discover the world from which we were exiled during the nineties, to recognize our true place at the beginning of the XXI century, to understand better ourselves and to be enriched by unforgettable new experiences. But an equally important mission was to present the real Belgrade, the spirit of this area and our culture to eminent European guests, together with the magnificent festival audience. Genuinely impressed prominent documentarians are still spreading the word throughout Europe and the world about what they found to be an amazing festival and a bright city always open to new trends and ideas, which has been enchanting them year after year with its warm atmosphere and people. In this dramatic year, in addition to fantastic historical ups and downs, to the horror and despair of many of us Belgrade has suffered drastic destruction. One of the darkest points is the triangle between the festival’s  venue, the Serbian Parliament and the Assembly of the City of Belgrade, an area where the festival atmosphere has been intensively spreading in previous years.

In addition to all that, threats, brutal violence in the streets, people being taken away as in the times of notorious military junta dictatorships, led the festival to the most difficult but inevitable decision – this year’s edition of  The Magnificent Seven will not take place in the planned September date. If the basic meaning of the word festival is a celebration, then for the expected celebration of a modern documentary film, we beleive that at this moment we have neither the opportunity, nor the reason, nor the right. Still, despite everything, we hope to meet again in the near future.

Photo from 2019, Zoran Popovic and Tue Steen Müller with the Parliament in the background, where a demonstration took place. Today it looks different: https://orf.at/stories/3404233/

Memories… Audrius Stonys was at the Balticum Film & TV Festival in the beginning of the 1990’es. He and Arunas Matelis were the young talents, who showed short documentaries in the Kino Gudhjem on Bornholm. Films like “Antigravitation” and “Earth of the Blind”. Later came “Uku Ukai”, “Alone”, “Countdown”… and together with Kristine Briede “Bridges of Time” that gives us the story of the poetic Baltic documentary cinema with Herz Frank and Uldis Brauns and Ivars Seleckis and…

Audrius is here in Riga with a project, “Bride of the Invisible” that in a beautiful way follows up on the short films mentioned above.

He is now a veteran, he is a grandfather, his daughter is here with her husband – Marija Stonyté is the producer of her father´s film-to-be (!), his son by the way, Paulius, is a cinematographer, very much in demand, yes it is a film family – Audrius is also making tv portraits together with his father and sister, Aiste Stonyté.

In 2013 my late colleague Allan Berg made “Audrius Stonys, Collected Posts on his Works”, you can google it, Allan admired Audrius, met him year after year on Bornholm and wrote beautiful texts about his films. In Danish. RIP Allan.

And – photo – here we are, Audrius and me, in a room where the pitching training takes place. Lovely moment, thank you for your films and the many times we have met in Vilnius and around the world!

The winner of the Documentary Competition of the 2025 Sarajevo FF.

I had not heard about this film before, even if it was at the Berlinale. And to be honest, when I read the synopsis, I thought “ok, here is another film on racism”, I hope it goes deeper than all the well meaning reportage-like tv documentaries. It did.

Again this shows the skills of a good director, who decided to stay with her protagonists for a year in a mix of direct and arranged documentary cinema and yet it is obvious, that the director has been looking for and found, with the help of the protagonists, the white woman and the black man, the scenes that gave us viewers a rich film, emotionally and rationally. I use these words, also because they correspond to how Victoria describes the two: I am the rational, Siaka the emotional. Will this match work? Siaka is the one, who suffers, for more than 20 years, since he left Gambia and his family, that is constantly in his thoughts, for them it is a question of survival, he says and we understand that the couple – they are married – send money to help. We understand the cultural differences between Victoria’s Austria and Siaka’s Gambia.

I want to be happy and I will be with my wife and my child. He talks like that, also before the two become parents and after they have been to Gambia to celebrate their marriage.

What should be in the film? There is a very intense conversation set up by the director, where Victoria argues that there should be more good moments in the film, whereas Siaka thinks that the pain must be there, and he is the one talking about “we”, the viewers should understand what it means to be a migrant, in this case a black man in a white country, where the institutions, the system is not really with you – I am writing this from Denmark, a country with hard rules for foreigners, to say the least. Understandable. The ambition of the film obviously is to reach a wide audience, so it also includes scenes from Victoria’s family, a lovely grandmother there is, her divorced parents. This is maybe a bit too much so I am happy to

… mention my favourite scenes, which take place in the backyard of building where the couple lives. Siaka helps another resident to renew their common garden. He does, he is very nice to her, she is very nice to him… but don´t make a BBQ! We have to understand and help each other. Fight racism!!!

Austria, 2025, 105 mins.

From the documentary competition of the Sarajevo FF 2025

At numerous workshops in Eastern Europe I have told filmmakers from that part of the world that to call all characters or protagonists “heroes” is not a good idea – as in English they are people, who have done something extraordinary, outstanding, with courage, people who deserves admiration. I have just finished my armchair watching of a film with protagonists, who are heroes in the best sense of the word.

And who simply are the best film protagonists, you could wish for: Oleksandra Lysytska (“Alaska”) and Yuliia Sidorova (“Cuba”), who fill the film with their unique personalities. Close friends, both working as combat medics on the front line, experiencing what war is, when it is most brutal and deadly and at the same time spreading good atmosphere within the male teams they are part of. Cuba is in most parts of the film laughing her way through life, caring, and so much more, when Alaska gets seriously injured and end up in a wheelchair for some time followed by hard rehab; she has to learn to walk again. She draws, whereas Cuba is a talented fashion designer and the film follows her to a show in Paris – and from there to Alicante, where her mother lives with their dog. By the way, Cuba reminds me so much of Apolonia from the film with the same name by Lea Glob. A powerhouse of energy and passion.

It’s a roller coaster of a film full of strong emotional human scenes from the front line and from the medic cars, where you are invited to follow the professional work of Cuba, when she is trying to save lives or “at least” limbs of wounded soldiers.

I found myself shouting at the screen, using words used pretty often in the film, motherfuckers and bastards, it makes you angry, an understatement, but sometimes, with tears in eyes, it is unbearable to watch. But the two women’s hunger for Life, their dedication to their jobs that they have been performing since 2014, their friendship and all the funny situations with Cuba laughing and Alaska’s dry humor, make this film viewer go through good and bad emotions on behalf of women fighting for a free country. It has to be said that there are wonderful male characters as well, like Artist and Baldhead and Sreba. The latter comes to play an important role in the film.

The film is a big international coproduction, part of the Ukrainian documentary slate within Arte. Meaning that also this UA documentary will reach a big audience outside the festivals, where it is touring right now.

Photo credit: Yegor Troyanovsky, who is now in the army.

Ukraine and many other countries, 2025, 93 mins.

I have several times on this site praised the film of Ketevan Vashagashvili, that I know – also as a project – for many years due to the CinéDoc Mentoring Program in Georgia. Ketevan came from journalism into documentary film making and she represents a wonderful example of how the two approaches can benefit from each other. The film is in the Documentary Competition in Sarajevo FF.

I quote from an interview – anonymous – from the Daily 8 of the Sarajevo FF. To be recommended:

“My Foremost Concern Was To Avoid Portraying Zhana As a Mere Victim of Her Circumstances…”

Indeed she avoids that. The main narrative point in the film is the relationship between mother and daughter. That was the motivation for the jury at CPH:Doxto award the film:

“The winner in the Human Rights Competition is a film that portrays the relationship between a mother and her daughter with a radical intimacy and an outstanding tenderness. Through its visual poetry the film balances delicately between the harshness of their situation and the humanity of Zhana and her intense love for her daughter.”

And another quote from the interview of Daily 8 of the Sarajevo FF:

The dialogue you mentioned between Zhana and Elene holds great significance for me. When I first filmed Zhana and Elene on the streets, the film aired on TV, prompting a social agency to seek Zhana to understand her situation. By the time we already located her, she was already in a rented apartment, thanks to the film, but they began questioning her ability to support Elene. Zhana requested that I accompany her to explain to them that she was a good mother and would never allow Elene to live in an orphanage. The thought of Elene in an orphanage was a nightmare for her. I stood by Zhana, of course. During Zhana’s surrogate pregnancies, traumatized and shocked, I often questioned whether I had acted correctly or if the social care system could have done more for Elene, potentially preventing Zhana from enduring the toll on her body. Yet in that moment, witnessing Elene stand so firmly for herself, I realized that she would never possess such strength without Zhana’s unwavering love and the opportunities she provided for her education and independence.

Photo of the director taken from the Daily 8.

Georgia, 2024, 84 mins.