On Thursday, 19 November, after the screening of Next to Me at the Kinodvor Cinema, the audience was addressed by the film’s director and co-screenwriter, Stevan Filipović. He came up with the idea of casting young people when Mirjana Karanović, professor of acting and dean of the Belgrade Academy of Arts, asked him to introduce the medium of cinema to students mostly dealing with the techniques of theatre acting. The teaching experience and a different perspective on a generation ten years his junior encouraged him to contemplate a portrayal of the young growing up with mobile phones and the Internet. What Filipović finds problematic is the lack of communication between the parents, the generation also including teacher Olga (Hristina Popović), and children. According to the director, parents have failed to understand the mechanisms of Facebook, and their conviction about its bad influence has cost them their children’s trust. The young fall victim to the agitational far-right rhetoric of the populist media that, unlike their parents and teachers, are in step with the times. The film, which offers a penetrating insight into society and its burning issues, including the complex dynamism of intolerance (especially homophobia) among the young people, is ‘softer’ than Skinning – it hasn’t provoked as hostile reactions from the Serbian nationalists –, but somehow more explicit. The director, who cited Bertold Brecht and Hannah Arendt as his influences, was mysterious about his future plans but revealed that he was working on three projects at the moment.

Stevan Filipović will be again available for questions after the Friday screening of The High Sun, to commence at 19.30 in CD’s Kosovel Hall.

Written by Andraž Jež

Photo Iztok Dimc

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