Diana Nenadic: Film Production in Post-war Societies: New Societies produce new Films and vice versa?

This lecture by Croatian film critic Diana Nenadic will focus on recent documentary film production in the region, with particular emphasis on Croatia, as a way of exploring the correlation between new cinemas and new realities in the countries of former Yugoslavia during the period following dissolution of the Yugoslav federation and the Balkan wars of the 1990s,

During the millennial years, we have seen significant shifts in terms of production, as well as in style and modes of representing reality. Crucial changes are represented by the subjectivization of documentary discourse, including the affirmation of different individual identities within various different sub-genres of non-fictional autobiography, personal essay, documentary self-portrait, as well as various activist and participatory projects. Reflecting the global trend of disbelief in documentary "objectivity“, this turn towards a more subjective perspective was motivated both by the filmmakers' need to face up to personal or collective traumas, as well as by their resistance to the homogenizing, nationalist discourse which marked the construction of reality in the regional audio-visual media of the turbulent 1990s.