The Hub

A group of people are standing along the platform of a railway station in La Ciotat, waiting for a train. One is seen coming, at some distance, and eventually stops at the platform. Doors of the railway-cars open and attendants help passengers off and on. Popular legend has it that, when this film was shown, the first-night audience fled the café in terror, fearing being run over by the "approaching" train. This legend has since been identified as promotional embellishment, though there is evidence to suggest that people were astounded at the capabilities of the Lumières' cinématographe.

Kieslowski’s later film Dworzec (Station, 1980) portrays the atmosphere at Central Station in Warsaw after the rush hour.

For Serbian filmmaker Mila Turajlic, a locked door in her mother's apartment in Belgrade provides the gateway to both her remarkable family history and her country's tumultuous political inheritance.

A study of the psychology of a champion ski-flyer, whose full-time occupation is carpentry.

Can a language save your life? Yes it can, even an ancient one from the 15th century. Saved by Language tells the story of Moris Albahari, a Sephardic Jew from Sarajevo (born 1930), who spoke Ladino/Judeo-Spanish, his mother tongue, to survive the Holocaust. Moris used Ladino to communicate with an Italian Colonel who helped him escape to a Partizan refuge after he ran away from the train taking Yugoslavian Jews to Nazi death camps. By speaking in Ladino to a Spanish-speaking US pilot in 1944 he was able to survive and lead the pilot, along with his American and British colleagues, to a safe Partizan airport.

This eye-opening and bittersweet chronicle of the Yugoslavian film industry recounts how the cinema was used—often with direct intervention from President Josip Broz Tito—to create and recreate the young nation’s history, replete with heroes and myths that didn’t always hew closely to reality.

Drazen Petrovic and Vlade Divac were two friends who grew up together sharing the common bond of basketball. Together, they lifted the Yugoslavian National team to unimaginable heights. After conquering Europe, they both went to USA where they became the first two foreign players to attain NBA stardom. But with the fall of the Soviet Union on Christmas Day 1991, Yugoslavia split up. A war broke out between Petrovic's Croatia and Divac's Serbia. Long buried ethnic tensions surfaced. And these two men, once brothers, were now on opposite sides of a deadly civil war. As Petrovic and Divac continued to face each other on the basketball courts of the NBA, no words passed between the two. Then, on the fateful night of June 7, 1993, Drazen Petrovic was killed in an auto accident. This film will tell the gripping tale of these men, how circumstances beyond their control tore them apart, and whether Divac has ever come to terms with the death of a friend before they had a chance to reconcile.

Hundreds of frozen and starved people floating on boats in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea fleeing from the war... Familiar scenes that we are used to seeing in recent times. But the year is 1944, and the refugees are travelling from Europe to Africa. After Italian capitulation,and before the arrival of German army, 28 000 Dalmatian Croats left their home villages and towns to live for two years under the tents in the middle of Egyptian desert, in a kind of a communist model village that was formed to show the Allies how the new Yugoslavia will look like when the war ends. This is a story about them.

Documentary that follows events after the fall of Slobodan Milosevic, while looking back on the previous fifteen years, tracing his rise to power. Personal testimony alternates with analysis of a disintegrating society.

In 1910, the Pennsylvania Railroad successfully accomplished the enormous engineering feat of building tunnels under New York City's Hudson and East Rivers, connecting the railroad to New York and New England, knitting together the entire eastern half of the United States. The tunnels terminated in what was one of the greatest architectural achievements of its time, Pennsylvania Station. Penn Station covered nearly eight acres, extended two city blocks, and housed one of the largest public spaces in the world. But just 53 years after the station’s opening, the monumental building that was supposed to last forever, to herald and represent the American Empire, was slated to be destroyed.

This documentary was inspired by the artistic life of Serbian actress Sonja Savić. Being a wonder child, a star of Yugoslavian cinematography, a sex symbol, and urban legend of the eighties generation, a fighter against establishment, Sonja Savić had always attracted attention. Simply put, she always looked, spoke and thought differently from others, she was entirely autonomous, an authentic phenomenon of Serbian culture. In the documentary SONJA, friends and colleagues of Sonja Savić testify on many aspects of her life and work, and a special emphasis is put on Sonja’s libertarian, rebellious, Don Quixote type of nature.

Bosnian Croat writer Miljenko Jergović and Serbian writer Marko Vidojković replace one another by the steering wheel of Yugo, a symbol of their common past while driving on the Brotherhood and Unity Highway that stretched across five of six republics of Yugoslavia.

In the Kosovo War, human dignity was shattered by the terrors of the Serbian government and the Albanian liberation army. Truths about the victims’ fates faded away, which is why a Finnish forensic research group led by Helena Ranta got a mission to act as an unbiased agent and investigate the real course of events.

Petar Peca Popović is one of the greatest, most famous, most authoritative and for sure, the best, connoisseur of Rock and Roll in the former Yugoslavia. He promoted Rock and Roll in those heroic times. We are going on a peculiar kind of trip with him, along an "emotional homeland", of ex-Yu, "searching for the lost times" and dear friends, the most significant representatives of this culture - rock'n'roll legends.

Emir Kusturica views himself as a rock musician and believes that he became a world-famous filmmaker by pure chance, as he shoots his movies only in between concert tours with the “No Smoking Orchestra” band. At these little pinpoints of time he gets “Palms d’Or” at Cannes, “Golden Lions” in Venice, builds his own villages, a power plant and a piste and regrets not becoming a professional football player. Kusturica’s own living is very much similar to his movies, where shoes are polished with cats, death is treated like a story from tabloid press, and life is a miracle...

A documentary-narrative film which looks at real events and personal phenomena of artist Zarko Lausevic. "Laush" above all tells a story of an evil time we've all been through, represents both sides and is made with empathy and respect towards everyone involved in the tragic incident. Through recreations, narration, memories of colleagues and quotes from the book "A Year Passes, a Day Will Never Pass" which the artist wrote during the hardest stage of his life, the weight of his fate is presented. The aim of this project is to portray the life of brilliant actor, who in the midst of great fame, disappeared from the scene through the cruelty of dubious times.

The Weight of Chains is a Canadian documentary film that takes a critical look at the role that the US, NATO and the EU played in the tragic breakup of a once peaceful and prosperous European state - Yugoslavia. The film, bursting with rare stock footage never before seen by Western audiences, is a creative first-hand look at why the West intervened in the Yugoslav conflict, with an impressive roster of interviews with academics, diplomats, media personalities and ordinary citizens of the former Yugoslav republics. This film also presents positive stories from the Yugoslav wars - people helping each other regardless of their ethnic background, stories of bravery and self-sacrifice.

A research-based essay film, but also a very personal perspective on the history of socialist Yugoslavia, its dramatic end, and its recent transformation into a few democratic nation states.

In 1992, the Yugoslav army and Serbian paramilitary forces captured one-third of Croatia as the country was engulfed in a state of war. A squad of fighters is defending their position in the small but strategically significant village of Sunja, where the invaders have surrounded them on three sides. Ivan Salaj, a young and gifted director who was still enrolled in film school at the time, chooses to use their story as the subject of his student film. Considered one of the most important films from a period when Croatian independence was still at stake, it provides an accurate portrayal of life on the front lines. What makes Hotel Sunja even more special is that it was made by a group of students who risked their lives to make the movie.

The most popular children's magazine in Yugoslavia was called Modra lasta (Blue Swallow). In 1969, it created Lastan. For hundreds of thousands of children Lastan was a mythical hero who helped unhappy and confused little souls. Each child imagined him differently and felt confident to share with him what they could not confess to anyone else: Dear Lastan, I kissed him, am I pregnant?; Dear Lastan, I fell in love with a boy from my class... For decades Lastan was a legend and the best kept secret in journalism. This film, for the first time after almost five decades, reveals his true identity.