Regie: Miloš „Miša” Radivojević; 136 Min., SCG 2005, Serbisch m. engl. Untertiteln
Wettbewerb: Golden Black Box Competition

Brotfabrik Kino, Fr, 17.11.2006 um 20:00 Uhr
babylon berlin:mitte, Mo, 20.11.2006 um 22:00 Uhr
Brotfabrik Kino, Fr, 24.11.2006 um 18:00 Uhr

Belgrad 1999: ein Intellektueller steigt aus seinem Grab, ihm bleiben 48 Stunden, um sich zu artikulieren und offen gebliebene Beziehungen zu klären... Gewinner des FIPRESCI Preises beim FEST Belgrad 2005.

The plot for the film Awakening From the Dead takes place both in Belgrade and a small town in Serbia at the beginning of the bombing campaign at the end of March 1999. Forty-year-old Mickey, an unaccomplished writer, a disillusioned assistant professor at the Faculty of Arts, a discouraged democrat and a columnist dismissed from a high-circulation daily newspaper, emerges from his own grave and re-immerses himself into his own life. He visits his small family in Belgrade, his old dying father, who still lives in the small town where Mickey was born, his friends and his childhood sweetheart, and through his contact and conversation with them he liberates them from their illusions as well as himself from his own. What he didn’t manage to do during his life he is trying to do during his death, all within 48 hours, while also trying, post-mortem, to save the dignity of his own surroundings and his tribe, not caring much for his own. He does all this quickly and clumsily while smeared with ink and blood, but with the ‘clear conscience’ of a being who, after a life of hesitation, wavering and doubts, has decided to act. He returns to his own comfortable, quiet, warm, safe grave to spend the time that’s left for him till the end of a wrong and iniquitous world.



Cast

Svetozar Cvetković Miki
Ljuba Tadić stari Petar
Anita Mančić Džoja
Aleksandra Janković Tamara
Ana Franić Nagorka
Tihomir Stanić Rale
Svetislav Goncić Zoki
Nenad Ćirić Doktor Kole
Vanja Andrić mali Petar



On the eve of the war I was in my fifties and since my health was good, on this threshold of my old age I made a kind of plan. After a dozen of my old films, I thought that it would be nice to make another 3-4 final ones.
I have always approached moviemaking with a certain lightness. Second, even after twelve films, I am still somewhat anonymous, I don’t have an international reputation, simply, I am a sort of looser in these artistic circumstances, what was a comfortable position. Nobody expected anything similar from me, so that was easy. On the other hand, my films grew old with me and with time it became clear that they were more serious than it had seemed at the time when they were released. I know it sounds like magic, but film is precisely that.
“Breakdown” was at the time dubbed as light pornography, and in reality I was dealing with the moral dimensions of people who worked in the papers. That problem has surfaced later and become obvious. Nevertheless, I will avoid that question by saying that I love all my children and I believe in all my films. For example, all doors opened for me after my third film “The Testament”, which was very obscure, but later when I started making so-called cinema films, I was completely rejected. What they made us go through after “The Very Promising Boy” was unthinkable. Everyone would be discourage after such ostracism, but my attitude was – I have made a film and everyone is entitled of commenting it.
My new film “Awakening from the Dead” doesn’t offer any illusions, it is literally an epitaph on the tomb of the generations of the sixties and those who came after.



It is a generation against which a crime has been committed. However, I preferred to deal with the younger generation, although we all feel like that. However, although I might sound like a porn star, everything in that movie did happened to me. We have lost our identity and our meaning and we will need a lot of time to get them back. This film encompasses all my worst premonitions, it comprises the surplus of darkness that I had in me, it is grim to the extent that I doubt that anyone else will understand it if he doesn’t have the same experience. Had the film been made in some “lighter” time, maybe there would even be three films. That’s when the main things happen. That simply means that I made a miscalculation. It was a time when you couldn’t make films in that way, so this time I worked in the other way.
Miša Radivojević



Screenplay & director Miša Radivojević
Director of photography Radoslav Vladić
art director Nemanja Petrović
set design Nikola Berček
costume & make up Slavna Martinović
Edtor Andjela Ilić
Music Korenlije Kovač