On 11 August 1999, most of Europe was engrossed in the total solar eclipse, which momentarily enveloped the earth in darkness. But in Serbia, people were busy barricading themselves in their homes and shelters for fear of another darkness. Filmmaker Nataša Urban travels back to former Yugoslavia to collect stories and anecdotes from her family and acquaintances of their time during the Yugoslav Wars that tore apart their country. The eclipse serves as motif and metaphor in her paradoxically evocative and thoughtful film about her own childhood during this period. Shot on analogue 16 mm film with an artist’s eye for seeing traces of the past as deposited in the present – both physically and emotionally – Urban creates a rich, existential work of imagery with a quiet, philosophical weight that is rare and precious.
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Festival Appearances
CPH:DOX 2022 – DOX:AWARD Best International Feature Documentary
International Documentary and Short Film Festival of Kerala 2022
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Nataša Urban
Nataša Urban, an Oslo-based documentary filmmaker and editor working professionally since 2005, was born into a Serbo-Romanian family in north Serbia in 1977. She graduated in 2001 from Bucharest’s University of Arts, in the Department of Photography and Video. She also holds a Master’s degree in Photography, awarded by the University of Arts in Belgrade in 2008.
Her films – Journey of a Red Fridge (2007), IDFA First Appearance Competition and IDFA Top 25 Audience Favourites, and Big Sister Punam (2006), which won the UNICEF Award for Children’s Rights – have screened at film festivals worldwide and received more than 40 awards. They have aired on major TV networks and are part of educational programmes in schools around the world.
Sat, 5 Nov | 3:00 pm | Picture Time 2