previously published on Cineuropa
There is a strange
paradox hidden in the term “occupation” being used for taking a
closed, defunct cinema, renovating and opening it again for the
public. The act itself, of breaking into and entering someone else's
private property, is, of course, illegal, but not necessarily
immoral, since the cause is noble, and places like these are often
subject to corruption or some kind of financial speculation. There
are plenty of examples in Europe, ranging from Rome's Cinema America
to Sarajevo's Kriterion, but recently, the occupation of the Zvezda
cinema in Belgrade caught the attention of both domestic and foreign
media outlets, the general public and international public figures
like politician Yanis Varoufakis, philosopher Alain Badiou and
filmmaker Michel Gondry. Senka Domanović's
debut feature-length documentary, Occupied Cinema, which is
having its international premiere in the Documentary Competition of
the Sarajevo Film Festival, is an earnest and reasonably successful
attempt to tell the complete story of the occupied/liberated Zvezda
from the insiders' perspective.
The background to the
events is no secret. The bankrupt Beograd Film company, along with
its 13 cinemas, was acquired by a shady firm. Some of them were
repurposed, but most were simply closed. In November 2014, a group of
film workers (among others, filmmakers Luka Bursać and
Mina Đukić, and actress Hana Selimović)
and public-space activists (Dobrica Veselinović being
the most prominent) squatted Zvezda, thus making it the first
reopened cinema in Belgrade and the only former Beograd Film-owned
theatre still in operation, albeit only sporadically nowadays.
As is usually the case
with such actions, the problems start piling up once the initial
euphoria has worn off. Luckily, Domanović was there with Siniša
Dugonjić, who operated the camera and recorded the sound on
the spot, to film the events and the atmosphere. As the events
progressed, her project turned into an attempt to offer a rational
answer to what went wrong. But most of all, it is an account of a
power struggle fuelled by creative and world-view differences, with a
distinctive class angle to it. Basically, the film people wanted to
keep the cinema as a place where they could show their work, while
the activist members of the crew opted for a more open approach,
making the cinema a place not only for cultural activities, but also
for public debate, and formulating a strategy against the neo-liberal
model of privatisation. Some were labelled middle-class and even
bourgeois, while others were branded as NGOs (which is a kind of slur
in Serbia). There was not much common ground: only one person (film
scholar and activist Ivan Velisavljević) served as
a mediator, while the smartest and most brutally honest remark in the
film, highlighting the absurdity of the fight, came from a homeless
person: “If you can use the space as you please, why can’t I do
the same?”
Style-wise, Occupied
Cinema is a solid piece of work. The camerawork has a feeling of
“right here, right now” to it, adding to the authenticity of the
film. The title cards are well done, eloquent and informative. The
editing by Mina Nenadović is more than competent,
and the directorial decision not to do “talking heads“
interviews, but rather to let the subjects walk around the cinema
while talking, works well, increasing the pace and the overall
dynamism, and efficiently overcoming the artificiality of the
four-chapter structure and the approach combining the footage from
the occupation time and the “one year later” reflections by the
people behind it.
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