JULY 18-19, Friday - Saturday at 7, 9:15pm
A SLICE OF BLOOD AND HONEY:
Experimental Cinema From Macedonia

Against the struggles of economic hardship and bitter Balkan politics, Macedonia has a flourishing youth culture. NWFF Studio Director, Dave Hanagan, visited its capital, Skopje, this spring to meet filmmakers and bring back examples of their work as part of a CEC ArtsLink grant—supporting cultural exchanges between the US and Eastern Europe. Among these four programs are short films, video art and documentaries that provide a sometimes playful and sometimes jarring reality as it is seen by the eyes of Macedonia's young, contemporary artists. Macedonia is going through a unique period as it shrugs off the stifling socialist patriarchy to become a modern, cosmopolitan nation. Consciously and unconsciously, Macedonia’s emerging artists capture both the nation’s sense of curiosity and paranoia. Dave will be on-hand to present the films and discuss the significance of these artists and their emerging culture.
 
JULY 18, Friday at 7pm
Visual Shorts

Contemporary artists in Macedonia have a lot to think about. While they struggle against having too few materials and aging institutions, they manage to paint a picture of the issues in the balkans that is vastly more complex than the news headlines. With these films, you'll find some common cinematic genres, devices and inspirations playfully reinvented.


Fifteen Seconds (Darijan Pejovski, 17.5 min)
After a girl wakes up in a small, isolated room with a TV showing images of her being tortured, she struggles to escape what turns out to be the labyrinth of a dangerous and bizarre hospital.

Aleph (Borjan Zafirovski, 15 min)
A minimalistic, black & white experimental narrative examining the validity our reality versus an infinite number of possibilities.

What’s Behind: The Urban Prototypes Project (Hristina Ivanovska, 2.5 min)
An animation inspired from drawings derived from issues of homelessness and ethnic unrest.

The Sick Bear (Djordje Jovanovik, 1 min)
A common children's toy is given a chance to express feelings of isolation and loneliness.

Absence (Vanja Dimitrova, 21 min)
A film that questions the morality of a war photographer, a female war victim who becomes a killer to honor life, and innocent bystanders as the future victims.

Human Nailing (Ivan Ivanovski, 4 min)
The nails have to nail the humans.

The Elevator (Dorijan Milovanonik, 2.5 min)
A story about a boy and what happens to him in an elevator.

4x Space (Filip Jovanovski, Dejan Ivanovski & Risto Avramovski, 4 min)
A film connecting two complementary mediums: architecture and film.

Teasing (Ivan Ivanovski, 1 min)
An animation, teasing our perception of bodies and intimacy.

Silence of the Lambs (Natasha Dimitrievska, 1.5 min)
A girl and a donkey, best friends on the streets of the big city, they thought it would harm nobody if they ask for a little money. Then she got the message.

The Little Potato Peeling Girl (Vladimir Lukash, 2 min)
A meditation on a common chore.


JULY 18, Friday at 9:15pm

Does It Hurt? The First Balkan Dogma
(Aneta Lesnikovska, Macedonia, 2007, DVD, 100 min)

This film is reality based on fiction. It's director Aneta (lives and works in Holland) mixes her life and those of her friends with a fictional situation that she has invented herself. As most of her friends in her home country Macedonia are actors and filmmakers who do everything but act and direct (due to no funding possibilities in a land in transition), she decides to give them false hope in order to make her film. Aneta lies to her friends that she found producers who will fund her film if they will help her out by sharing their life stories. She films the whole process and what was meant to be the making of becomes the actual film. Film about the lives of Balkaners made from their own perspective.

Does it hurt? is the first Balkan, as well as the first Dutch film shot according to the Dogma rules and is the directors 10 year celebration gift to the Dogma movement.



JULY 19, Saturday at 7pm
Documentary Shorts

Macedonia is a country of wide extremes. A young, thriving metropolitan center is only a few miles distance from bare, mountainous villages. These three documentaries cross the cultural divide with their brief look into the opposite ends of Macedonia. But they also begin to reveal what is universal in Macedonia: the lively spirit and passions of its people.

Ghetto 103 (Jane Altipamokov, 11 min)
A documentary about Skopje’s underground radio station as it saved from being taken off the air by party-loving protestors.

The Grandmas' Village (Dragana Zarevska, 18 min)
A rustic, mountain village in Macedonia has a total population of 15 grandmothers. The mythological origin of the town and its slow pace (punctuated by energetic gossiping) are cleverly illustrated as the filmmaker inserts herself into the village and its grandmas.

The Name Without a City (Ivan Mirkovski, 30 min)
After Skopje's devastating 1963 earthquake, the filmmaker's uncle returns to Skopje to help rebuild the city. However, the architect's high ambitions for a "city of the future" and a "city of solidarity" are let down and force him to create an imaginary model of the city. Skopje's identity, both it's physicality and it's civic soul, are brought into question.

JULY 19, Saturday at 9:15pm

The Judge
(Zaneta Vangeli, Macedonia/Germany, 2001, DVD, 102 min)
The Judge is an experimental narrative about a young director, making his first movie called The Judge. His movie is in fact a portrait of the devil—it's a very unconventional portrait of a modern evil interested in art and politics. During the process of production and postproduction of his movie, Vlad Freeborg, the director, is facing some temptations, which are in a mysterious way synchronous with the events in the outside world.

Programming Team: Natasha Dimitrievska, Biljana Tanurovska, Violeta Kachakova and David Hanagan.

This programme can bee seen as well on the official web site of the Northwest Film Forum:
http://www.nwfilmforum.org/cinemas/macedonia.php

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This programme is continuation of the collaboration between Lokomotiva and Northwest Film Forum established for the firs time in 2002 through the cooperation between Biljana Tanurovska and Dave Hanagan, the director of the Northwest Film Forum. Tanurovska, as an ArtsLink fellow presented a program of Macedonian films in Seattle in 2002 and worked together with Hanagan on production of a documentary film.

In March/ April 2008 Dave Hanagan was a guest of Lokomotiva, and together they presented the Northwest Film Forum in front of the Macedonian audience by organising a two nights screening programme (11/ 12 April) of Cinematic Experiments from the Pacific Northwest.