Fear is all around

Review of Are you there? by director Øystein Johansen

By NIKOLA SKOČAJIĆ

The audience was seated in the circle, so the raidus of the performance was 360 degrees. The actors – only two of them, a boy and a girl (might be lovers) had only a table, a chair per each and a threat of a hammer to work with. Artificially created conflict between the actors and the off-space, had a strange effect on the audience who was seated “in the battlefield” (at the same time, on – and off stage).

Are you there? is a mime performance from Holland, directed by Øystein Johansen, and staged in ODA theatre. As it’s been said, almost all the mime is directed to the off space, but a few sentences the audience hears from both of the actors (Guido Pollemans and Elsa May Averill), evoked the work by Samuel Beckett – in an introverted kind of way. This introversion lies in the fact that the extensive poetry of absurdity of waiting, was transformed from language (text) to vocal poetry of a few, but well designed sentences, which were there to be explored by repetition: “Someone is going to come. I can sense that someone is going to come, etc.” Every time the text was being repeated with an different intention, ranging from welcoming enthousiasm to terrifying fear. Every time it had to sound different, and considering that after a few minutes the audience knows it by heart – the text gets completely shared with the audience – it creates a certain ringing in the ear, without making it predictable.

These intoning differences caused a genre confusion in the first fifteen minutes of the play.  The crowd laughed at their absurdist argument. And it was funny, but some of them continued to laugh all through the performance, even when the comedy slipped into it’s diametrical opposition: when the atmosphere turned grim and claustrophobic.

Are you there? is a performance based on the transfer of a special kind of emotion. Fear did not emerge out of any real danger. The fear felt real, because the actors seemed genuinely afraid. One thing that pointed that out is probably the position of the audience – the crowd wasn’t able to look towards the “expected” threat, because when the actors did that, they looked towards the audience.

It should be said, that there was no real relation between the two characters. It was sketched a few times, but still it was every man for himself. Considering the divided attention, a spectator often had to choose which one to watch. The performers were brave not to lean on the usage of light or sound, which were used, but in a very subtle way. The question “Are you there?” was obviously pointed at the audience, so someone might have answered – but was too afraid to do it. Everyone remained in their seats, and laughed while being afraid.

‘Just trying to fit in’

An interview with film producer Uroš Tomić

By ASJA KRSMANOVIC

“We chose the title Kiselo dete (acid child) for the name of our production company,” says Uroš Tomić. He is one of the producers of Tilva Roš, the debut film of director Nikola Ležaić.

“Kiselo dete is the title of a novel written by one of our friends. Kiselo dete is rude, uninterested in things that happen around him, but is also a hard worker and somehow trying to fit in. Just like us. Also, the strange coincidence is that Nikola, Mina and I come from three of the most polluted cites in Serbia. Nikola is from Bor, where the movie was shot, Mina is from Kula and I am from Pancevo.” Their partnership started on the academy in Belgrade, where Nikola Ležaić, Mina Đukić and Uroš Tomić studied directing. After they finished, they started working together professionally. The deal is: when one of them is shooting a movie, the other two are the producers.

Tilva Roš is a great success. The film has been screened on 20 film festivals, has won 11 awards, 5 of which for best feature movie. Nikola’s movie Tilva Roš is their first project because it was the easiest one to be produced, Tomić explains. Since Nikola is from Bor, they got to use all the locations for free. All the actors were amateurs, and the team got funding from both the state and city of Belgrade.

Tilva Roš – the original name of the copper mine where the film was shot – is a generation movie. It tells the story about growing up as a part of the youth skateboarding subculture in small, dying city. A group of teenagers spend their last summer vacation in small place called Bor – once it held the largest copper mine of the region, now its just a big hole – before life separates their ways. Some of them deceide to go to college; others stay to search for a job.

But that summer, the longest summer of their lives, they spent by making their own Jackass-style videos and hanging out on their skateboards. The film is mostly based on real characters that more or less act as themselves. Also, the ‘Jackass-videos’ used in the film are shot by two main actors: Marko Todorović and Stefan Đorđević.

The movie had its regional premiere at the Sarajevo Film Festival, where it won the awards for Best Movie, and Marko Todorović recieved honours for Best Actor.  The world premiere was in Lokarno, and after screening in Priština at Skena Up the film will be shown at festivals in Rotterdam and Goetheburg. Lastly, Tilva Roš will be distributed for the American market.

‘Picking sides’

An interview with director Yael Reuveny (Tales of the Defeated, Israel 2009)

By NIKOLA SKOČAJIĆ

In 1945, a family that spent quite a time in a Nazi concentration camp gets split in two. The director’s grandmother decides to drift away from the place of her catastrophe to the new Jewish state, while her brother Feiv’ke chooses to change his name, and stay in the place where he was once a prisoner.

Tales of the Defeated is a documentary film made by Yael Reuveny, a young Israeli movie director – shown today in an International Film Competition at Skena Up. The film transgresses a personal quest for the truth about her family history, and is concerned with a concept of choices that were there to make.

“If you pick sides from the beginning, you end up making a bad documentary,” Reuveny says. “Of course I was close to my grandmother, but when she died in 2001, there were only questions left behind. What I found out about my grandmother’s brother was way bigger then I thought it would be. Not only he lived through Holocaust, he also stayed in Germany to have a family there. Besides, I ended up crossing the border – while learning history, the bad guys are always these faceless creatures, I didn’t think about them in a way that, after the war, they might have lead normal lives.”

The director considers her heritage rather important, and claimes to have a strong jewish identity. “My grandmother came from a different world, I don’t think that she ever imagined that she would end up in a jewish country surrounded by her family.” Yael is only the second generation removed from the Holocaust, so she was asked about a possible anger she felt towards people she interviewed in Germany – who were a part of the stained history.

“This movie is dialectial in a way that everyone thinks I did pick a side, and although I myself am not sure what side might that be. As a character in the film, I hope it’s transparent that I didn’t feel any anger talking to those people, and even though it couldn’t get more personal. While talking to them, I had to choose to believe or not to believe the things they had to say. Considering I’m also a director, it got quite schizofrenic.”

“In the beginning was the word…”

A quick snapshot from our seminar…