Siniša Juričić

Djangarchi is a film about Oleg Mankuev, one of four throat singers, the Djangarchi, from Kalmikija. Kalmikija is an autonomous republic of the Russian Federation and the only Buddhist country in Europe. Djangar is an epic poem that has been sung since ancient times. This poem is the carrier of national pride and identity of the people of Kalmikija throughout generations. Djangarchi has also been called ‘the carrier of eternity‘. Conceived as an exciting road movie documentary, the film follows Oleg's journey from Kalmikija to Croatia, in search of his own identity and new musician friends. By singing this old epic poem, Oleg is about to leave his motherland Kalmikija and is about to go to Rijeka (Croatia) to cooperate with Damir Martinovic, the frontman and the producer of Let 3, a famous and surely the most eccentric Croatian band.

The idea of the film is to follow several artists who are involved in graffiti art, all around the world (US, UK, France) to show their aims and hopes, their problems, obstacles they face when doing their art, as sometimes they might even end up in jail. Through their explanations of how the art works, we would like to form some sort of visual lexicon of the art that is very present but still very marginalized.

A documentary film about the everyday life of refugees in Georgia, who escaped from the war in Grozny. The sphere of the story is Pankisi Gorge in Georgia, the neighbouring country of Chechnya, where hundreds of Chechen refugees run for shelter. There will be one main protagonist - Musa, a singer who tries to pass on the knowledge of the Chechen music; the everyday life of Musa’s family will be the central narration of the film. The central moment in the film is to describe the life of the children who live here, and the film narration will incorporate their monologues as they recall scenes from the past or speak about their future plans and dreams. The film’s structure will be small vignettes, small episodes of the children’s lives in Duisi primary school. At the beginning of each episode their name will be shown, which they will write with white chalk on a blackboard and introduce themselves. They tell us in their own way of their pain, joy and dreams...

This is a story of life and death told through the language of music. Fifteen musicians of the funeral orchestra in Kavadarci now struggle to survive. Once they played at about seventy funerals a year, but since a chapel was built next to the cemetery entrance, almost no one orders music for funerals. The families do not wish to pay for a hundred meters of music, i.e. the distance from the chapel to the graves, since people in town will hardly hear it. So the musicians now try to earn some money by playing at weddings and similar festivities, but very few would hire the funeral orchestra to play at a wedding.

Three turbulent decades of the last century are reflected through the story of science fiction films made in Socialist Yugoslavia.
Divided by decades and unraveled chronologically, One Dying Star opens in the 60s with Cold War at its peak. Yugoslavia is leading the Non-Aligned Movement and its economy starts getting the first whiffs of capitalist mentality. Yugoslav Communism was different and so was Yugoslav Sci-fi. Mostly aimed at kids or very niche art house audiences, Yugoslav Sci-fi films were based around a unique set of values, ranging from the perpetuation of leftist ideological practices to further affirmation of the Non-Alignment ideology.
Our film intends to set the story of Yugoslav Sci-fi cinema against the backdrop of social and political dynamics, including the breakup of the country. Advances in science, modernist architecture, political concepts of self-management which included utopian elements and the overall change of lifestyle encapsulated in consumerism shaped a very special imaginaria of Yugoslav society and local Sci-fi.
Even though Yugoslav Sci-fi is terra incognita when it comes to film history and especially foreign audience, the genre actually attracted such famous auteur like Golden Berlin Bear-winner Želimir Žilnik, Oscar-winner Dušan Vukotić and Oscar-nominee Veljko Bulajić.
The film is made mostly out of archive materials, both from the movies they talk about and actual footage of the times. Testimonies of filmmakers, film critics and theorist on the subject such as Slavoj Žižek, Branko Dimtirijević and Nenad Polimac paint the audio background and bring the story about intersected dreams of the society as channeled through Sci-fi genre.
With tens of features to cover and major directors involved in the genre, with the vibrant social and political context, this is a promising subject that will take us to the next frontier of Yugoslav film and culture study, where no man has gone before.