Within the Human rights Film Festival | Kinoteka na Makedonija-Skopje | 18-20 November 2016 |
As prelude 18 November (Friday)
8pm
Austerlitz by Sergei Loznitsa (74min.)
The new film from Sergei Loznitsa Austerlitz, is a stark yet rich and complex portrait of tourists visiting the grounds of former Nazi extermination camps, and a sometimes sardonic study of the relationship (or the clash) between contemporary culture and the sanctity of the site. What happens when the memorial and the museological meet — when places of death and destruction are transformed into tourist destinations? Sergei Loznitsa’s new film Austerlitz (which takes its title from, and enters into cryptic and compelling dialogue with, the final masterpiece by the great novelist W.G. Sebald) is a stark yet rich and complex portrait of people visiting the grounds of former Nazi extermination camps, and a sometimes sardonic study of the relationship (or the clash) between contemporary culture and the sanctity of the site.
9.15pm Ilegalni Parnas – Book presentation by Bojan Babic
What does it mean to be a Foreigner? Discussion with Bojan Babic and Nikola Gelevski Moderator: Robert Alagjozovski
“I have made a mistake somewhere in the past, and now I am lost in the wrong life“.
Sebald – Austerlitz
Since the beginning of wars in ex-Yugoslavia, there is one dominant feeling in our region – feeling of irreparable ness, loss of faith that things can get any better, historical pessimism that, during the time, turns into anthropo pessimism, loss of belief in humankind. Where does this feeling of dead end, this feeling of impossibility to make essential change in our society, in our lives, where does this phenomenon of, as Sebald wrote “lying under the low sky and breading through hole of a needle” come from?
Are our individual memories socially conditioned? Why do we feel expelled, eradicated, like we are emigrants, even though we didn’t even move away from our homes whole our lives? Are we expelled from our tradition, of from sense itself?
Is literature a deep search for causes of subtle, unbearable, hard psychological conditions of characters, caused by historical circumstances, through which author, and narrator, and characters, and readers roam, until they hit the wall of historical silence?
Does being an artist in society like ours today mean being an activist, or being an escapist? Do we have the right to live in Parnassus that we have built for ourselves in the middle of this muddy road of unfreedom and corruption?
Those are questions we are going to talk about, without giving final answers.
Bojan Babic
Born in Belgrade in 1977. He finished high school in Mladenovac and Graduated at the Faculty of Philology in Belgrade, from the group of Serbian Literature and Language with General Literature. He has published three books of short stories and four novels and numerous articles in various journals in Serbia, the region and beyond. He is winner of “Borislav Pekic Fund” award in 2011, for the omnibus – novel Girls, be good. The novel Illegal Parnassus was short listed for NIN award and regional prize “Mesa Selimovic”. Book for boys is a novel published in only 100 copies. He was the guest of a residential program for European networking of writers and translators – “Traduki”, in Sarajevo in 2012 and the Swedish Institute and the Association “Crocodile” in Sweden. The stories have been translated into Albanian, Swedish, English, German, Icelandic and Hungarian. Babic publishes fiction, poetry and columns in magazines and is represented in several anthologies.
Bojan Babic, is the November writer-in-residence guest of the residential program for writers and translators, under the slogan “Absolutely modern”, organized by the publishing house Goten, under the auspices of the European Network for literature and books Traduki in Skopje.