Panel Discussion: Exploration of individual and collective memory in cinema
FRIDAY 29 NOVEMBER | 18:00h | FILMHUIS DEN HAAG ROOM 6
The Panel “Exploration of individual and collective memory in cinema” takes as its starting point three exceptional films: Norika Sefa’s short documentary Like a Sick Yellow (Between Film and Art), Dragan Jovicevic’s hybrid docu-fiction Warm Film (Documentaries Open Debate, Memory in Cinema, LGBTQIA+) and Vlad Petri’s hybrid documentary Between Revolutions (Documentaries Open Debates, Memory in Cinema). The panel will be moderated by Orlando Maaike Gouwenberg.
In Sefa’s Sarajevo award-winning short, bad and beautiful things intertwine in old home VHS videos of a Kosovo girl. This leads to a new amalgamation of various elements, just as time, represented by repetitions and loops, ends in tragedy. In Jovicevic’s feature, the director looks at the representation of queer identity in Yugoslav and Serbian cinema, how it developed, what shape it had, and how it reflected the society’s idea of it in different eras, as well as how it is perceived today. Petri’s FIPRESCI-awarded documentary at the Berlinale offers a unique view of two revolutions, composed of constructed memories through fictional letters exchanged between two friends – Zahra from Iran and Maria from Romania.
There are many connections between these three formally very different films. Individual and collective memory are as unreliable and constructed as fictional recollections, influencing each other: a person’s home videos will always colour their memories, while collective ideas, as perceived through cinema and media, distort an individual’s recollections and shape their view of particular issues. These and many other points provide rich material for the three filmmakers’ exploration in this talk.
The Memory Panel will take place at Room 6 on Friday 29 November – 18h