When the Phone Rang

In the mind of an 11-year-old girl, a single phone call in 1992 changed her entire life, marking the end of her country, childhood and sense of self. 

When the phone rang, time stopped forever at a point: Friday, 10:36 am, 1992. One call, one voice on the other side of the wire, brings the news of the death of the grandfather and at the same time announces the end of childhood, the end of a country, the end of the world as it existed. For young Lana, personal tragedy becomes the first crack through which war and the unsettling world of the adults penetrate. The filmmaker guides us through the fragments of Lana’s memory: playing spying games with neighbour kids, falling in love with the punk rocker, focusing on the details of everyday life in a quite uncertain atmosphere. All these moments, collected like souvenirs in a box, become the only way to hold the world together. A film about loss, about reminiscences of a childhood and a country that exists only in stories and in the hearts of those who had to leave it.

Programme section: Cinema Current / New Female Voices
Original title: Kada je zazvonio telefon | Year: 2024 | Duration: 73′
Country: Serbia, USA | Language: Serbian | Subtitles: English
Director: Iva Radivojević | Production: Andrijana Sofranić Šućur, Marija Stojnić – Set Sail Films; Ivaasks Films, Picture Palace Pictures | Cast: Natalija Ilinčić, Srna Vasić, Vasilije Zečević, Danica Maksimović | Screenplay: Iva Radivojević | Cinematography: Martin DiCicco | Editing: Iva Radivojević

FESTIVALS & AWARDS (SELECTION) 

Locarno Film Festival, 2024 – World Premiere, Special Mention | Thessaloniki Film Festival, 2024 | Mostra de València, 2024 – Best Original Score | FilmFestival Cottbus, 2024 – Best Film Award, FIPRESCI Award | Festival de cinéma En ville!, 2025 – Special Mention | ​Crossing Europe Film Festival Linz, 2025 – MIOB New Vision Award | Beldocs, 2025 – ​Special Mention | CPH:DOX, 2025 | Al Este Peru, 2025 ​– Special Mention

DIRECTOR’S BIO 

Iva Radivojević was born in Belgrade and spent her early years in Yugoslavia and Cyprus. She is an artist and filmmaker who currently divides her time between subarctic Alaska, Brooklyn, and Lesvos. Her work presents itself as a collection of fragments (observations, poetry, images, sounds, melodies, languages) that come together to connect into a ruminating whole. Her work circles displacement and belonging, seeking to connect to the metaphysical or the magical. Iva’s films were screened at the New York FF, IFFR, CPH:DOX, SXSW, DocLisboa, Museum of Modern Art (NYC), PBS, and New York Times Op-Docs. She is the recipient of the Sundance Art of Non-Fiction Fellowship, Guggenheim Fellowship, Princess Grace Special Project Award, and Film Fellowship. When not working on her own films, Iva enjoys editing, cutting both documentary and narrative films; her credits include Celia Rowson-Hall’s “MA” (Venice FF) and “All That Passes by Through a Window That Doesn’t Open” (awarded at Visions Du Réel).

DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT

The entire film is constructed of specific memories that have stayed with me from that period just before leaving Yugoslavia. Everything in the film is based on real events, memories, and people. Although the events happened at different time intervals – perhaps two days apart, three weeks or five months apart – in memory they are all squeezed in and around the event of the phone call… With the film, I’m interested in recreating and revisiting the days before the departure, which signal a kind of tearing, a kind of death. The film is fragmented in the same way that memory is fragmented. In fact, a migrant’s existence is inherently fragmented as they move from country to country, language to language, reality to reality. The film investigates not only personal memory but also the collective memory of a particular moment in place and time.