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.
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.
A documentary about punk and subculture scene of Pula, Croatia from 1978 to 1991, the city that gave birth to one of the most vivid punk and alternative rock scenes in former Yugoslavia, despite having population of just over 60,000 residents.
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.
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.
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.
True stories of the Croatian People's struggle to overcome oppression from communist Yugoslavia and the 1990's fight to save their war ravaged homeland.
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.
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.
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.
On 11th of July 1995, the most mortifying crimes after World War II in Europe destroyed the Bosnian town of Srébrenica. Shootings and deportations beyondimagination were preceded by a betrayal of humaity: while 40,000 civilians were looking into the sky of Srébrenica, waiting for a sign from the international community, guaranteeing their protection, the headquarters of the United Nations decided to surrender. The betrayal kill 8,372 men, women and children. Sky above Srebrenica (101 minutes) is based on protocols of the secret crisis meetings of the UN headquarters. In a unique way never before released original material of the consequences is shown next to those who are responsible for these.
Through the conversation with Yugoslav film authors and excerpts from their films, this documentary film tells a story of a film phenomenon and censorship, and its focus is, in fact, a painful epoch of Yugoslav film called “a Black Wave”, which was the most important and artistically strongest period of Yugoslav film industry, created in the sixties and buried in the early seventies by means of ideological and political decisions. The film tells a great “thriller” story of the ideological madness which characterised the totalitarian psychology having left multiple consequences felt up to our very days. It stresses similarities between totalitarian regimes defending their taboos on the example of the persecution of the most important Yugoslav film authors. Those film authors have, however, made world careers and inspired many later authors. The film is the beginning of a debt pay-off to the most significant Yugoslav film authors.
Yugoslav Partisan propaganda film about the post-World War II events in Pula.
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.
They were called ‘the golden generation’, the young Yugoslavian soccer players who won the Junior World Soccer Championships in 1987 in Chile. They became world-famous and today play in Rome, Milan and Madrid. But the country they represented in Chile no longer exists. Director Vuk Janic talks with soccer heroes like Zvonimir Boban and Sinisa Mihajlovic and visits the neighbourhoods they grew up in. Via the soccer, he tells the story of the disintegration of his country. The supporter riots in 1990 during the match between Red Star Belgrade and Dinamo Zagreb heralded the imminent war. Shortly after, the team fell apart. Seven years later, as national players of Croatia and little Yugoslavia, they compete in two charged qualification matches for the 2000 European Championships. Soccer is not war, but the war is never far away. The first match in Belgrade has to be cancelled due to NATO bombings, and the two national hymns are drowned in deafening whistles from the audience.
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.
This first-person documentary provides an inside look into the terrifying and bloody events that shook Central Europe in the 1990s, as the filmmaker takes a trip along the road that once united the disparate states of Yugoslavia, from Slovenia to Macedonia. A film about memory, hatred, love and hope.
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.