Marta Popivoda: “The role of cinema is to imagine other possible, better worlds”

 

Marta Popivoda (Photo credit: Maja Medic)

Experimental in form, and deeply political, Landscapes of Resistance, the feature length documentary of Serbian director Marta Popivoda, is both a portrait of the late antifascist fighter Sonja and a reflection on the antifascism of today.

In conversation with the director ahead of the film’s screening within the context of the 23^rd Thessaloniki Documentary Festival (June 24-July 4, 2021).

Your latest documentary, Landscapes of Resistance, is an “unorthodox” work. I’ll start in an unorthodox manner, too. I would like you to tell me something more about the song that bookends it. Why did you choose this particular one?

The opening song is actually a very beautiful old song written by Yugoslav fighter for social justice Mihovil Pavlek Miškin. It dates from the period between the First and Second World War. It’s about inequality, oppression of the peasants and class society.

The version that is featured in the film is performed by the LeZbor, lesbian and feminist choir from Zagreb.

It is, therefore, very contemporary.

I thought it was important to have this version because it’s musically stronger, there is a queer, feminist and antifascist perspective in it, and because of Zagreb being part of former Yugoslavia, which is the context I refer to in my work.

It works in the same way the rest of your film does, trying to trace deeper connections between the past, the present and the future.

Your film has been in the making for quite a long time- has it been a decade or so?

Upon my first meeting with the late Sonja Vujanović, I immediately realized what a powerful and suggestive storyteller she was, and this triggered me in a way that I wanted to make a film with her.

Also, her story is exceptional and had some answers to the questions I was thinking about, like how you become a partisan.

Our first encounter took place more than a decade ago. Over the course of several years, Ana Vujanović, co-writer of the film, and I recorded interviews with Sonja.

Even back then, in 2007-2008, I knew that I wanted to make this film, but in some respects, I wasn’t feeling ready. Maybe I was too young. I thought that her figure and story required me to be a more powerful filmmaker.

Then, in 2016, I just woke up one morning and felt like I needed to finish the film. That now is the right time to tell this story. I felt that Sonja’s story needs to become “our” story in some ways.

Back then I also wrote the first script draft out of the transcripts of these interviews.

Alongside her granddaughter, Ana Vujanović.

Definitely. Ana and I are long term collaborators, and also partners in love and life.  We conducted the interviews with Sonja together and she was a dramaturg on the film.

Also, Ana wrote these diary inscriptions which are one of the layers in the film which reveal our personal perspective.

We share many socio-political concerns- and much more.

I was about to comment on that.

At some point we decided that it was important to inscribe our context, political and personal position, to show who is making this film.

That we are women, feminists, a queer couple from leftist-activist scene in Belgrade... and also indicate why this story is important for us today.

Still, this component of the film is very discreetly inserted into it in comparison to Sonja’s story and presence on the one hand, and of the landscapes, on the other.

First, there was Sonja’s story. Listening to her was like reading a film script, so I already had images in my mind, which we call “verbal images”.

I wanted to give space to these images, so my main directorial gesture was to place the mental images that she produces through her storytelling into the landscapes where events from these stories happened. 

Back then Ana was working on her concept of landscape dramaturgy, which comes more from the performing arts, and we discussed it a lot.

From these discussions emerged the question: “How can we populate/inhabit the landscape with different gazes or perspectives?”

I was thinking about this problem and how I can “solve” it cinematically. I conducted some visual experiments and came to the idea of constructing these hybrid landscapes by observing the same (s)place from different perspectives at the same time.

And then you can really travel through these landscapes, feel the layers of time and connect all this to the moment we are living in today. You have time for reflection. 

In terms of visual references, I would mention constructivist and cubist landscapes from the visual arts, as these movements were leftist art from Sonja’s time.

But to go back to your comment, the layer of the diary inscriptions came at the end, and we wanted to keep it discreet. We wanted to inscribe ourselves into the film but did not want to compare our experience with Sonja’s or take too much attention. 

Are all the places mentioned in the narration the ones where the actual events happened?

Most of them are the actual ones, otherwise they are topologically close. Even in Auschwitz, we went to the exact places she mentions. But, of course, sometimes it wasn’t easy to trace or access the exact location.

She was a very powerful and at the same time calm character. How has it been getting to know her and to what extent has she and have you changed through the course of this encounter?

When I first met her, she was still old, but very present and engaged in everything around her. We got to learn a lot from her stories, but also from her understanding of the present context back then.

Both Sonja and her husband Ivo were communist and antifascist fighters. He was also a dissident later. They were Marxists. They had this very clear Marxist political education and method of understanding the world around them.

For me, Marxism is a tool to understand society and power relations in it - and not just when you’re young and part of the movement as Sonja was, but also when you’re old.

What I definitely learned from them is that political education is essential if you want to be an actor in a society. It is crucial to understand what is happening to you, and to other people around you, and it gives you the possibility to resist.

Because new fascisms are coming in new forms, and we need to confront them today. What we learned from Sonja is that we don’t need to be heroes in order to become partisans, and there is no alternative today.

Sonja survived Auschwitz partly also because she knew why she was there -as a political prisoner. Of course, she was lucky to be able to self-organize, resist and survive, because many people didn’t have this chance.

This exchange between three of us also concerns what it means to be a feminist. Back then, in Yugoslavia before the Second World War, she was an activist for women's rights.

She fought for women’s right to vote, which women in Yugoslavia acquired quite early, in 1945, with the first socialist government.

She was going from village to village talking to women and discussing with them why it was important to have the right to vote. So, this feminist activist experience she had was also very important for Ana and me and brought us closer together.

I believe this film and the whole process was important to Sonja as well, as she wanted to hand us her story. She wanted the story of antifascist resistance to continue to exist and live, even when she is gone.

In the film, Sonja dies, but her story continues and “travels” to the bodies of the new generation of antifascists.

All is done in a very discreet, low-key manner. With such a person and story, one might have done something overly dramatic that would evoke strong emotions. One has the feeling that she describes something very ordinary.

In this film I’m definitely interested in the womanly side of war, and this of course is a reference to Svetlana Alexievich and her book The Unwomanly Face of War, where she interviewed female antifascist fighters.

We get to see how women remember things that were erased from history, and this is how people related to each other in these difficult times, how they self-organize, how they get politicized and became partisan/antifascist fighters.

It’s usually not part of a big, macro-historical narratives where we have heroes and drama. Our idea was to question the notion of Hero, which comes from a dominantly patriarchal ideology of history and war.

We wished to juxtapose self-organization, solidarity, and collectivism, and care with the idea of one and only true hero, which is almost always a man.

Sonja always mentioned her comrades, how she was part of a collective struggle, the dimension of solidarity and self-organization. She wouldn’t have survived if she had been just an individual.

So, we are dealing here with an anti-heroic narrative which also needs different cinematic form.

Since you’re very concerned about the fascism of today, what worries you the most about it? Or, where do you place your emphasis when you try to fight it through your lens- cultural, political or otherwise?

For me, the role of art or cinema is also to imagine or to remember other possible, better worlds.

To remember and retell Sonja’s story becomes especially relevant today when we live in the so-called neoliberal capitalism and radicalization of class society -that in the region of former Yugoslavia can be called “wild capitalism”- which deletes the public sector and the very idea of social justice.

Hand in hand with this comes the erasure of communism as a driving force of antifascism in Serbia and even wider, in Europe.

In our local context, we have revisionist political agendas and views of history in Serbia, as well as beyond, from the institutional level to everyday life.

They include the discourses of national reconciliation, thus also the absolution of fascists, the European resolution on totalitarianism, which lumps together fascism and communism, revisions of history textbooks used in schools, as well as the forceful separation of communism from anti-fascism.

In Serbia, for instance, we got two pieces of legislation that led straight to the rehabilitation of Nazi collaborationists. Also, in Serbia and elsewhere in the region, there is a high level of intolerance of LGBTIQ people.

Likewise in Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, and elsewhere in Europe, we have racism targeting Roma people, as well as the fear of migrants from Syria and Africa.

Ana Vujanović said it perfectly in one of our interviews: “Those barbed-wire fences that have sprung up, aren’t they emblematic of undead fascism, raised from the grave by the erasure of the memory of anti-fascism?”

It’s important for me to evoke with this film the idea that resistance is always possible. That we almost always have a choice. And this is present in every part of Sonja’s story, even in such a totalitarian context like Auschwitz.

And in one that slowly, gradually and ominously evolves nowadays, also in countries like Greece or Serbia.

Influenced by capitalist ideology, which claims that it’s not an ideology, people cannot clearly recognize the enemy. In Sonja’s time it was the occupiers and the class enemy. Nowadays, however, there are different ways to occupy (a country).

What worries me the most is the normalization of the violent right-wing discourses in mainstream politics- in the USA with Trump, or elsewhere with neo-fascist groups entering the political scene of countries like Serbia, Greece or Sweden.

Still, your film is out, and I assume that it will continue to “travel” to festivals, both online and, when possible, in the normal, physical manner.

Definitely. This is better than nothing!

Directed by Marta Popivoda, the documentary Landscapes of Resistance is screened within the context of the Film Forward section of the 23^rd Thessaloniki Documentary Festival (June 24-July 4, 2021).