Mila Turajlić
Druga strana svega (The Other Side of Everything), 2017 

Mila Turajlić is a Serbian filmmaker who explores the effects of political and social upheaval during and after the collapse of the state of Yugoslavia. In particular, she examines how the legacy of violence has affected the realities of people’s lives and their identities in the Balkan regions.

In her very personal film The Other Side of Everything (2017), Turajlić looks back over the course of an entire century at the politics and revolution of Serbia. This retrospection takes place through intimate scenes of the Belgrade apartment where Turajlić grew up and through a conversation with her mother, Srbijanka Turajlić, who was both a professor at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering at the University of Belgrade and a political activist.

The once spacious apartment is located in a house built by Turajlić’s great-grandfather, who was also the government minister who signed the document that created Yugoslavia in 1918. After the communist revolution in Serbia, the rulers confiscated half of Turajlić’s family home as they considered it too large and too bourgeois – the door to the living room has been locked ever since.

Mila Turajlić’s mother, however, is the true protagonist of the film. As one of the leading figures in the opposition to Slobodan Milošević’s régime, her name appeared on a right-wing extremist list of Serbia’s ​“30 greatest traitors” in 2015. Milošević’s former Information Minister Aleksandar Vučić has been Prime Minister since 2014 and President of Serbia since 2017. Srbijanka is pessimistic about the future, and her warning to be vigilant against the rise of nationalism and strongman politics is more relevant than ever. Against the backdrop of the current protests taking place in Serbia, the film offers an especially exciting and empathetic insight into Serbian history.