18.3 – 31.3 Jasmila Zbanic
Red Rubber Boots deals with the search of a mother, Jasna P., for the mortal remains of her two children, Amar 4 years and Ajla 9 months old. The children were kidnapped and killed by the Serbian army during the final days of the Bosnia war and allegedly buried in a mass grave. With the help of the state commission for the search for missing persons Jasna P. studied the available information, accompanied the search commission and visited all mass graves in the hope of finding the red rubber boots that her son was wearing when he was abducted and disappeared from her life, so that her children’s fate would finally be brought to a close.

1.4 – 14.4 Goran Devic
Goran Devic’s video work Imported Crows is a metaphoric meditation on how loss of identity finds expression in the identification of something foreign. The film describes a small town in Croatia where the inhabitants have come to see the town’s many crows as a foreign element, which has to be eliminated. It is claimed that the birds were imported into the town during the communist regime and that they were never welcome guests. Since then they have multiplied, becoming an increasing problem to the town and hence people are hired to tear down the crows’ nests. In his film Goran Devic creates an image of a troubled society, where the old identity has been violently replaced by another. When a society undergoes radical change in a short period of time and suddenly finds that it no longer has to face opposition, whether from the outside or the inside, there is a tendency to find or invent new opponents. In Imported Crows it is the crows that symbolize the unwanted, non-Croatian element making them a metaphor for the Other. By eliminating the crows, the inhabitants of the town believe that they can regain a sense of control and at the same time re-establish part of their lost identity. Goran Devic’s work deals with the profoundly human fear of the unknown and the striving for a sense of belonging while also depicting a people’s intense pursuit of freedom. Polemizising against small-town mentality Imported Crows renders the petit-bourgeois atmosphere with both criticism and humour showing how stigmatization appears as a projection of inner conflicts.

15.4 – 28.4 Pavel Braila
Pavel Braila’s video Shoes for Europe is a slow and hypnotic film that documents a winter night at a train at the Moldova-Romania border. The cars of the train must be adapted with wheels of a shorter axle dimension to fit West-European train tracks and vice-versa. This transition from east to west is a relic of the cold war, and will remain until new rail lines can be laid. Although the fall of the Berlin Wall was historically monumental, in relation to this task it remains symbolic. In the meantime this bit of history is maintained through hard and thankless work. Shoes for Europe is not a meditation on labour as much as it is a portrait of the train in its dual guise as an allegory for the rate of history, and a metonym for the history of modernity. It speaks about the differences between Old and New Europe and the consequences of the fall of the Berlin Wall for the new nations that were formerly part of the Soviet block.

29.4 – 12.5  Renata Poljak
Working with film and photography, Renata Poljak explores hierarchical structures in both societal and personal relations. Her early works questioned the position of women in Croatian society, a thread she follows in the piece Great Expectations, which takes Poljak’s own family relations as a starting point. Parallel sequences present us with reflections on life in the house of her own family while she analyses the Croatian state-building project and scrutinizes the influence of capitalism and post-war injustices. The film traces the transformations the Croatian coast has undergone during the past decade and how it has been affected by the destructive culture of unregulated building. Camera spans show traditional Dalmatian surroundings marked by the symbols of the new Croatian transitional economy and post-war social traumas. Using violence as a common denominator Poljak interweaves narratives belonging to public and private spheres producing a thought-provoking study of the implications of recent developments in Croatia. In this attempt to understand how war brutality has mutated into new forms of socially acceptable violence, Poljak constructs a model for comprehending the many transformations of her country and home town.

13.5 – 28.5  Michael Blum
Michael Blum’s Wandering Marxwards II – (The Three Failures) is the sequel of the 1998 work Wandering Marxwards. The first film was based on Eisenstein’s failure to film Marx’s Capital and addressed the relevance and context of a current re-reading of Marx. At the time of its production, the 150th anniversary of the Communist Manifesto was being celebrated and critical negotiations on the multilateral agreement on investments were secretly held at the WTO. Since then, many things have changed. The public in many countries, ignorant of the neo-liberal plans under way in 1998, are now aware of and active against the brutal moves of capitalism. The consequences of outsourcing, massive lay-offs and the dictatorship of rentability are now prime material for unions, anti-globalization movements and the emerging radical left. Furthermore, social-democracy and the welfare state are showing their limits – if not their end – even in the social role model countries of Scandinavia. Wandering Marxwards II – (The Three Failures) shifts the central focus from Marx to Eisenstein, as a shift from theory to practice, from an idea to its application in the world. Using the three cities Riga, Malmö and New York as representatives, the piece explores the failure of a political system at a given moment in history; in Riga the past failure of comunism, in Malmö the current failure of social-democracy and in New York the future failure of capitalism. The film develops as a narration going from Riga, the birthplace of Eisenstein and one of the cities which seem to have turned their back most dramatically on a Soviet past, to New York, where the image of the expected collapse of capitalism will be the most striking and spectacular.