Landscapes of Resistance

The main character of Landscapes of Resistance, Sonja, was one of the first female partisans in Yugoslavia and helped lead the resistance in Auschwitz. When we initially encounter her in Landscapes of Resistance, she is a friendly elderly lady with a playful cat on her lap. This is the start of an exceptional journey through her memories of revolutionary books from her student days, her wedding to a communist, the resistance against the German occupiers and her torture after capture as a communist and anti-fascist fighter, right the way through to her escape from the concentration camp. 

Archival material is conspicuously absent. Sonja also makes scant appearances. While we hear her voice-over, the camera travels to spots the stories could have taken place. A landscape is given Sonja’s voice: grass and trees, a crack in the wall, slates off an old farm shed, a pool of water, deer grazing in the distance, even the chimney that is still standing. Sometimes images are augmented by drawings and journal-like entries from Sonja’s granddaughter, who also wrote this film’s script. In this way, Sonja’s memories gently merge with the filming process, which took a decade and began to incorporate the authors’ concern about the rise of a new fascism in contemporary Europe. It is an unorthodox documentary: personal and political, sober and lyrical, crystal clear and intimate. Opening and concluding in song.

Biographies

• Marta Popivoda is a filmmaker and video artist. Her work explores tensions between memory and history, collective and individual bodies, as well as ideology and everyday life, with a focus on antifascist and feminist potentialities of the Yugoslav socialist project. She cherishes collective practice in art-making and research, and for several years has been part of the TkH (Walking Theory) collective. Popivoda’s first feature documentary Yugoslavia, How Ideology Moved Our Collective Body, premiered at the 63rd Berlinale, and it's part of a permanent collection of MoMA New York. Her work has also featured in major art galleries, such as Tate Modern London, MAXXI Rome and M HKA Antwerp. Popivoda received the prestigious Berlin Art Prize for the visual arts by Akademie der Künste Berlin and Edith-Russ-Haus Award for Emerging Media Artist. Her new film Landscapes of Resistance premiered in the Tiger Competition of the IFFR 2021 and won several awards.

• Ana Vujanović is a cultural worker focused on bringing together critical theory and contemporary art. She holds Ph.D. in Humanities (Theatre Studies) and post-graduate diploma in Culture and Gender Studies. She has lectured at various universities and was a visiting professor at the Performance Studies Dpt. of the University Hamburg. Since 2016 she is a team member and mentor at SNDO – School for New Dance Development, Academy of Theatre and Dance Amsterdam. She was a member of the editorial collective of TkH [Walking Theory], a Belgrade-based theoretical-artistic platform, and editor-in-chief of the TkH Journal for Performing Arts Theory (2001-17). She participates in artworks (performance, theatre, dance, and film), as a dramaturge and co-author, with artists such as Marta Popivoda, Eszter Salamon, Christine de Smedt, Dragana Bulut, etc., most recently in the documentary film Landscapes of Resistance dir. by M. Popivoda. She has published a number of articles in journals and collections and authored and edited several books, most recently A Live Gathering: Performance and Politics in Contemporary Europe, ed. with L. Piazza (Berlin: b_books, 2019). Her new book Toward a Transindividual Self, A study in social dramaturgy, with B. Cvejic is in press.

• Daniella Shreir is the founding editor of Another Gaze, a print and online journal exploring films and feminism. She is also the founder and programmer of Another Screen, an irregular streaming platform, free and available worldwide with subtitles in multiple languages. She works as a literary and non-fiction translator from the French, with her translation of Chantal Akerman’s My Mother Laughs receiving a PEN award in 2019.

(Text source: IFFR website)