A Film a Week - When the Phone Rang / Kad je zazvonio telefon

 originally published on Cineuropa

"It happened in a country that no longer exists, except in books, films and memories of those born before 1995", we are informed by the off-screen narrator (Slavica Bajčeta) at the very beginning of Iva Radivojević’s third feature When the Phone Rang, premiering in Locarno's Cineasti del presente competition. The phone rang one Friday, at 10:36 in the morning, the year was 1992, and it completely changed the world our protagonist and the filmmaker’s alter-ego Lana (Natalija Ilinčić) had existed in so far. In the first repetition (of ten in total), she is informed by the voice from the other side that her maternal grandfather died of a heart-attack. For her, that call announced the war, so soon enough, she and her family left the country.

The narrator explains that the urgency of the call lasted for days for Lana, and we soon get the meaning of that phrase. In the next repetitions, Lana receives different phone calls from different people, always on Friday and always at 10:36AM. We learn a thing or two about her fascination with her older sister's classmate Vlada (Vasilije Zečević), a punk-rocker and an anarchist who doesn't care about death, a glue-sniffer and her protector on the street; but also about the routine spying games she plays with her younger neighbour Jova (Anton Augustin), following and imagining the lives of strangers; having to say goodbye to her friends Mirjana and Olja; the words of love she shares with Andrijana; the troubles her father might have gotten into by dealing with a mobster nicknamed “The Barking One”; and the army background of her paternal grandfather…

It seems enough for several lives, or at least several periods of a life, and all of it rings true individually, but combined, these events only make sense as a mix of fading memories. But Radivojević’s film is not about the “facts” of the lives of the characters around Lana – instead, it is interested in the memories that tend to be produced at an inflationary pace at formative periods, and which often melt together with others into a confusion where only vague sentiments and emotions can be remembered. In this case, it is the memory of the collapse of Yugoslavia in a bloody war, and of the lives of ordinary people slipping into uncertainty, riddled with crime and poverty during the 1990s, as seen through the eyes of an 11-year-old girl.

Filming in the city of Novi Sad and finding locations that have not changed much since the 1990s, Radivojević makes a powerful and intelligent film that hits on both the cerebral and the visceral level. As was the case with her earlier works, she maintains full control over the material, working as her own editor, production designer and casting director. Regarding the latter, she really picked interesting, talented newcomers she could work with easily, especially Natalija Ilinčić, whose interpretation of Lana going through different emotions is simply stellar, further highlighted by Radivojević’s close-ups. 

The use of 16mm stock in Martin Dicicco’s cinematography might seem as risky, counter-intuitive move since the format is usually associated with more pleasant memories, but it brings another layer of dreaminess where colours get enhanced in a seemingly natural way, and the graininess of the material creates a foggy, blurry look corresponding with fading childhood memories. In the end, When the Phone Rang is an extremely well-made film, a concentrated and stimulating viewing experience that stays with the viewer.

A Film a Week - Aleph

 previously published on Cineuropa

The work of the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges is quite hard to adapt. Yet if there is one contemporary filmmaker who seems fit for the job, it is Iva Radivojević, who has proven with her earlier body of work in the short form that she can perfectly blend the narrative, documentary and experimental cinema into striking essay films. Her second feature-length film, Aleph, premiered at New Directors / New Films and is now screening in the Sarajevo Film Festival’s Kinoscope Real section.

As Borges wrote, the first letter of the alphabet, A, Alpha or Aleph is the beginning of everything and contains all of the world’s knowledge. Radivojević takes this idea as her starting point, makes it a little more concrete and sets off to tell a story which, content-wise, has little to do with Borges’, making her Aleph more inspired by the writing of Borges than a straightforward adaptation. She is open about this, pretty much printing it on the introductory title card.

The rest of her Aleph is a lucid dream that goes through several countries on five continents and several languages, exposing how the world is connected by sheer human presence. The film’s sort-of protagonist is the narrator, voiced by the poet Anne Waldman, the dreamer of the dreams of other people and places. It all starts in Borges’ city, Buenos Aires where a woman named Clara complains about “feeling too much.” In the next segment, we follow the desert guide through natural corridors somewhere in the Algerian part of Sahara. The story then moves to New York where the actor Žarko Laušević is interviewed by Maša Dakić about his career and prison experience. By the end of the film, Radivojević has also taken us to a Greek Orthodox monastery, a polar station in Greenland, urban Kathmandu, a river in Thailand, an almost surreal world of one set of twins / clones / doubles in South Africa and, finally, to space.

Aleph could be observed as a collection of short films, loosely threaded together by voice-over narration. But it can also be seen as a single, stylistically and narratively diverse yet rather compact feature film. There is a sense of coding to it, as every segment of the film is filmed in a different way and with a different style (some of them could make perfect tributes to the works of, for example, Jim Jarmusch and Apichatpong Weerasethakul), but the way one segment melts into another is also smooth and seamless. However, not all connections between the stories are linear, direct and foreseeable: Radivojević’s intricate interlinking adds another layer to the story and another dimension to the world she creates and recreates.

Judging by this, Aleph is a work of philosophy applied to the world of cinema, but it is also a work of auditory and visual poetry. Iva Radivojević maintains full control, editing the material herself while leading the rest of the cast and crew — cinematographer Jimmy Ferguson, for instance — with her vision, and a combination of precise instructions and freedom. Aleph is a demonstration of filmmaking versatility and intellect, but also of the emotion behind the process. It is a type of film that leaves a lasting impression.