28/9 //\\ 17:00 //\\ schikaneder
Reading: Maja Iskra hosted by Melisa Slipac
Maja Iskra grew up in the district of Dorćol in Belgrade, and studied in Vienna and Valencia. She is an engineer of landscape architecture and holds an MA in multimedia art. She lives and works in Vienna, at the intersection of urban planning and video.
Uppercut is her first novel, which placed second out of 575 entries in the 2022 contest organised by the publishing house BOOKA.
Uppercut was a finalist for the Beogradski Pobednik prize, as well as for the 2023 Zlatni Suncokret prize for the best novel in the Serbian language. It was longlisted for the NIN prize, the Laza Kostić prize and the regional Meša Selimović prize. Her story ‘Hiraeth’ won the second place at the European Short Story Festival in 2018.
Melisa Slipac was born in in 1978 Banja Luka, Bosnia and Herzegovina. She holds an MA in English, Spanish, Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian language and literature, and a PhD in Slavic Studies from the University of Vienna. Her first book of poetry Ples između zidova (Dancing among the Walls) (2007), was awarded the Petar Kočić literary prize for poets from the former Yugoslavia living in German-speaking countries. For more than 20 years she has organised literary readings and has worked in the arts and culture. She lives in Vienna and works as a language teacher and trainer.
//\\ 18:15 //\\
Revision(ism)s. Post-Yugoslav Experiences – film screening curated by Borjana Gaković
U ratu i revoluciji I In War and Revolution
Ana Bilankov 2011 | 15’ | OV with English subtitles
Using the example of a book published by her grandfather during the time of socialist Yugoslavia, Ana Bilankov addresses the banning of books in 1990s Croatia as the erasure of (collective) memory. She juxtaposes this with an interview with her 97-year-old grandmother who struggles with memory loss and suppression of the past.
Jedan dan u Sarajevu I One Day in Sarajevo
BIH 2014 | Director, Screenplay: Jasmila Žbanić | Cinematographer: Christine A. Maier | Editor: Isabel Meier | Sound: Igor Čamo | Producer: Jasmila Žbanić, Damir Ibrahimović | 59 min | OV with English subtitles
Sarajevo, 28 June 1914: the murders of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie mark the outbreak of the First World War, yet the historical role of the assassin Gavrilo Princip is disputed. Was he a resistance fighter or a terrorist? A century later, the city becomes an absurd backdrop for the questionable historiography of the story of Europe, in which various political camps attempt to top one another with their official memorial celebrations and dubious depictions of historical events. Žbanić deftly bundles the perspectives of those who live and work in this city still shaken by the siege years of the 1990s into a thorough report on its current state.
Borjana Gaković is a film and media scholar, curator, author and lecturer. Her work focuses on representations of history and medialities of historiography, European cinema of the 1960s and 1970s, feminisms in film history and war and trauma in film. Her film programmes have been shown in numerous cinemas and film festivals in Germany and internationally. Since 2020 she has sat on the Programme and Selection Committee of DOK Leipzig.
.dıtiramb in co-operation with this human world – INTERNATIONAL HUMAN RIGHTS FILM FESTIVAL