Review: Night truck driver
Night truck driver, By Marcin Świetlicki
Translated from Polish by Elżbieta Wójcik-Leese
Poetry
ISBN 9781938890802
128 pages
Bilingual: Polish and English on facing pages
Reviewed by Amanda L. Andrei
The world drips. Caught in some kind of thaw, circling a winter on the verge of melting into a dream, or a dream solidifying into a cold city, Marcin Świetlicki’s Night truck driver (Kierowca nocnej ciężarówki) translated by Elżbieta Wójcik-Leese, immerses us into icy, hypnopompic places where we can hear Death and other unseen forces calling to us—and maybe even respond to them.
The opening poem, “Preface,” invokes the biblical origins of Genesis, reset in 1960s Poland: a man, a woman, a snake, but also “a stupid apple tree,” “depots, dead buses. / Old lemonade bottles of that unusual shape.” Here are seeds of Świetlicki’s themes: an overpowering sense of menace between sleep and waking, entanglements between the masculine and feminine beyond mere mortals, set among noirish urban landscapes and frosty worlds. The final line, “We’ll be observing the advance of darkness” sets up the reader for the opaque stillness at the heart of winter, questioning what life, if any, remains beneath the cold.
“Everything drips” follows immediately with an imperative, or maybe even a plea: “Don’t come into my dreams, don’t. In one dream / drown for good and don’t show up in any other.” To whom is the speaker addressing? A relative, a lover, a stranger, a monster? The ambiguity of other people’s presences in this poem and others compounds the sense of unease, giving you the sense of a faintly remembered nightmare just out of reach, or a stranger passing by your unlit house. Later on, in “Saturday, an impulse” the speaker announces, “Evil has come to my dream,” after which a female presence instructs them to undress and return to bed where they embrace. Other poems suggest the speaker is themself a dream, conjured by a stone or a stone moon, or a person falls asleep in broad daylight, searching for a missive in the world of sleep. The space between dreamer and reverie is not simply porous or overlapping: it is all-encompassing, cavernous, dissolving into the ache of the unknown.
The female presence in the dreams, waking life, and spaces in between appears to be a lover, the mother of the speaker’s child—or perhaps many lovers, or many mothers—but also an anonymous, distant figure(s) who seems to be on a parallel yet displaced wavelength from the speaker. The speaker seems to be in constant dialogue with this presence and others like it, and even when those energies are absent from the poem’s scene, the speaker continues evoking, recalling, and defying them. Herein is the brilliance of Wójcik-Leese’s translation that melds this shadowy feminine presence with that eternal, ever-present mystery: Death.
One poem in particular showcases the paradox of having a relationship with that mystery. “Posthumous correspondence” (Korespondencja pośmiertna) takes the shape of a stage or screenplay script in which a Man dialogues with Death. Glancing on the left side of the page at the Polish, I observed that the poem followed a different structure, without the character/dialogue formatting.
Curious about this choice, I reached out to Wójcik-Leese, who explained that in Polish, death is grammatically feminine, and so verb endings signifying grammatic gender reveal which passages are spoken by Death and which passages are uttered by the other person. In their translation collaboration, Świetlicki suggested pointing out the different speakers in the exchange, which resulted in a fascinating version of the original poem in English. Both correspondents seem to be speaking aloud (as if in a script), but the framework of the text is as a letter. The reader feels the conflict and contradictions of their communication—not merely between speakers and what they speak of, but how they speak to each other and the plaintive rhythm of their exchange.
Towards the end of the collection, the poems become sparser, more like jottings and diary entries. It’s as if the narrator is integrating the past, musing over the present and future, where “Plastic soldiers utter their war cries” in the ironically titled, “First poem” which is the third to last in the volume. Maybe this is the first poem for a new world or worlds, a transition point for more. It’s significant that Świetlicki has written thirteen books of poetry and that Night truck driver is the first English language collection in his work, which Wójcik-Leese notes in the translator’s afterword “follows the chronology of his poetic life and the lives of his individual volumes.” One hopes that more translations will come, as Świetlicki and Wójcik-Leese capture so hauntingly and precisely the cold ache of being called—and caught—among many worlds.
Radio Interview with Trafika Europe where you can hear Elżbieta Wójcik-Leese read the poems in Polish and English.
Reviewer Amanda L. Andrei is a Filipina Romanian American playwright, literary translator, and teaching artist residing in Los Angeles by way of Virginia/Washington DC. She writes epic, irreverent plays that center the concealed, wounded places of history and societies from the perspectives of diasporic Filipina women, and she translates from Romanian and Filipino to English. For more information on her work and upcoming events, visit: www.AmandaLAndrei.com
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Theo Angelopoulos – The Landmark UCLA Retrospective
Review by Malina Stefanovska
In the Fall of 2022, the UCLA Film and Television Archive ran a complete retrospective of Theo Angelopoulos, a Greek film director and one of the most famous and beloved filmmakers of South East Europe. The full house of the Billy Wilder theater, the rapt attention of the audience during the many hours of watching, and all the diverse languages spoken around me, made it obvious that his admirers are not only Balkan born, but also a younger generation of film buffs from all over the world. Angelopoulos has won many premier awards, including the Palme d’Or at the Cannes film festival in 1998 for his film Eternity and a Day. Ulysses’ Gaze (1995), won the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes, and Landscape in the Mist (1988) was a winner at the European Film Awards, but it was The Travelling Players—filmed in 1975, during the military junta’s dictatorship in Greece—that established him as a unique voice in cinematography. UCLA’s timely retrospective, titled “Landscapes of Time: The Films of Theo Angelopoulos,” consisted of all the director’s feature films and a selection of shorts. In addition to the films mentioned above, I saw Days of 36, Voyage to Cythera, Alexander the Great, Meadows in the Mist, and The Hunters.
Having seen and loved Ulysses Gaze when it first came out in 1995, while the civil war was still raging in Yugoslavia, I wanted to see some other Angelopoulos’s films. They are so intimately intertwined with our Balkan history that I was ready to immerse myself in an experience that I knew might be unsettling and unforgettable.
I got more than I expected! I spent many hours in utter nostalgia for my Balkan roots, and the torn, conflicted, and stunning world poetically depicted in his films. It was inevitable that I completely surrendered to Angelopoulos’ meditations on history, reliving or imagining it with all my senses: images, music, the slow passing of time, the long shots of Macedonian villages in winter, the feeling of being part of a community, the exile and oblivion that engulfs it all sevdah, this feeling of sadness for what we have left behind, is the Balkan’s heritage from our common Ottoman past, the Eastern equivalent of the Portuguese saudade.
It is a sadness cultivated through beloved musical traditions, and glorified in poetry and cinematography. In a film modeled after Zorba the Greek, such longing would have been represented by drinking, listening to musicians, and breaking dishes, in a sort of communal catharsis.
None of that gesturing was present in Angelopoulos’ films, and I did not miss the expression of feelings in such demonstrative ways. Yet, as a typical daughter of the Balkan South, I was completely immersed in each of his films, gripped and torn by histories so closely intertwined with my own: my family, from what is now officially North Macedonia, came from both sides of the border; my father fought alongside Greek partisans in World War II, and even learned the language from them; the Manaki brothers (in Greek, Manakis)—whose disappeared reels of film are chased throughout several countries by the hero of Ulysses’ Gaze—lived in Bitola, my family’s hometown, and they were my grandfather’s friends. They both belonged to that Hellenophile ethnic minority, the Vlachs, that once created the city’s culture and is slowly disappearing.
Both on screen and in the audience, I heard long forgotten Greek words from my childhood, and—miraculously—I understood them. Even the recordings of village life by the Manaki brothers, shown in the film, brought back memories of my peasant grandmother teaching me how to spin wool. The bombing of Sarajevo, another beloved city of my youth, made me howl like the protagonist of Ulysses’ Gaze (top image), played by Harvey Keitel.
Needless to say, all the music, from the soulful rebetika to the peasant Macedonian music played by my grandfather, was equally and painfully close to my heart. Even my son’s name, Theodor, chosen in homage to my roots, brought me closer to Angelopoulos! It was as if he spoke exclusively to me, a viewer uniquely familiar with his world.
But then, in the rapt silence of the audience, I realized that something much larger than my own perspective and past connected us all. It was Angelopoulos’s unique cinematography and his understanding of history. This was evident by the audience never saying a word, never leaving before films ended (not even for the Travelling Players, which is over four hours long), in the enthusiastic applause after each show, and in the heartfelt and beautiful opening words delivered by UCLA’s head archivist Paul Malcolm and by Ioannis Stamatekos, the Consul General of Greece in Los Angeles, and Sharon E. J. Gerstel, director of the UCLA Stavros Niarchos Foundation Center for the Study of Hellenic Culture.
Theo Angelopoulos has become known as one of the most important filmmakers of the twentieth century. His career spanned from the early 1970s to 2012, when his last film was brought to a standstill by his tragic death during shooting. He was admired by such auteurs as Bernardo Bertolucci and Wim Wenders for his characteristic style: He used slow, ambiguous, overlapping narrative structures and long takes which often included meticulously choreographed scenes and many actors (The Travelling Players consists of only 80 shots in over four hours of film). He also championed a radical Brechtian point of view where the actors at times broke the fourth wall to deliver their narrative directly to the audience.
Most of Angelopoulos’s films are shot on the northern border of Greece, in rainy and snowy winter weather, in remote mountain villages. He preferred a dark palette of colors diametrically opposing the usual “tourist-sunny” representation of that country. I came to recognize a few recurring visual tropes: rafts or boats slowly gliding away on a river, a snowed-in mountain village, a long frontal take of a group walking up a slope, a conspiratorial whistle of insurgents that carried across the mountainous landscape. These epic and allegorical meaning are always present, to be interpreted at many levels, akin to a myth.
Angelopoulos’s films are as steeped in mythology as they are in recent Greek history or his own personal quest. In Ulysses’ Gaze, the four different women (played by a single actress, Maia Morgenstern), stand for Penelope, Calypso, Circe and Nausicaa, while its hero—a filmmaker named only “A”—is both Odysseus and a stand-in for Angelopoulos as “auteur.” The Travelling Players retells Aeschylus’s Oresteia, with characters ranging from Orestes and Pylades to Electra, Agamemnon, Clytemnestra and Iphigenia replicating the antique tragedies. The fusion and clash between myth and history is in itself the subject of Megalexander, the story of an early twentieth-century insurgent bandit who saw himself as Alexander the Great. What a pity that Angelopoulos did not live to see Alexander’s latest avatar revived, mythologized and re-appropriated as “Aleksandar Makedonski” in the newly-independent (and heavily politicized) State of North Macedonia!
But the main way in which Angelopoulos’ films touched me is not the retelling of myths, as rich as they can be. It is the more recent Greek and Balkan history, and his poetic and complex rendering of our connection with History at large. Some critics have said that “no one but a Greek can understand all the political, historical and mythic allusions.” This might be true, but the main tenets of Angelopoulos’s perspective remain excruciatingly clear.
The civil wars in Greece and some of its Balkan neighbors have taken most of the twentieth century in fits and starts. Fostered in large part by British and American imperialistic agendas and meddling (though swiftly forgotten by the West), these conflicts have been largely erased from the official historical memory of Greece. Yet they remain a submerged component of the proverbial popular pessimism in the region.
Both in The Hunters and The Travelling Players make this obvious in the constant juxtaposition between the 1936-39 civil war, the Second World War, and the civil war of 1947-52 which brought about Greece’s military junta. The unfinished search for a disappeared or fading past is in itself the principal theme of Ulysses’ Gaze. That quest is symbolized by Golpho, a popular pastoral played by itinerant players, that starts over and over but is repeatedly stalled by the interference of historical events. As a play that never ends, its allegorical meaning is clear. So is Angelopoulos’s haunting odyssey, Landscape in the Mist (1988), where the story told by an adolescent girl (named Voula, after the director’s sister) to her younger brother Alexander only provokes his complaint: “This story will never get finished.”
This innocent observation appropriately characterizes Angelopoulos’ cinema. From the absence of the conventional word “End” at the conclusion of his films, to his truly unfinished last one, to his penchant for interweaving variations of his personal history or episodes from earlier films into later ones, he creates a continuous, unfinished work. It is both intimately autobiographical and allegorical. Like the children in Landscape in the Mist, Angelopoulos’s films allow their audiences to cross into a space where the real and mythic intersect to map Greek and Balkan history.
Malina Stefanovska is a professor in the Department of European Languages & Transcultural Studies at UCLA
Originating from a multilingual and multicultural background in ex-Yugoslavia, Malina Stefanovska was educated on three continents: Africa, Europe, and America. She holds a B.A. from Grenoble via Université de Brazzaville, an M.A. from the University of Oregon, and a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University.
Professor Stefanovska also worked as an interpreter and translator for French, English, and Serbian, studied Spanish out of love, and wrote and translated literary texts and poetry in several languages. After completing her doctoral thesis on Saint-Simon, which was published as a book in France, Malina further specialized in memoir authors and autobiographical writings of Early Modern France, as well as their modern forms, from the narrative to the visual, from the fictionalized to “auto-fiction” or journal.
She is also a practicing autobiographer and recently completed a manuscript about a Macedonian childhood and family history. Her next project, related to passions and emotions in 17th and 18th century France, will consist in a study of Casanova, written in the form of letters to this author by a reader who admires him.
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Review: And If I Don’t Behave Then What
Reviewed by Amanda L. Andrei
Open Fist Theatre Company
Through March 4
And If I Don’t Behave Then What
L.A. premiere of the new play by Iva Brdar
Ovaries on the concrete. Chin and cheek dimples with the sound of a drill. Being polite, kind, and well-behaved in the face of nameless, insidious forces.
The play consists of various vignettes, starting from Age 0 and culminating when “Woman” is in her 70s. Woman consists of Cynthia Ettinger, reading pages of printed paper or from her phone as she recounts memorable events of a life. However, Woman also consists of Carmella Jenkins, who could be interpreted as a version of a younger self, or another part of the subconscious, and at times Debba Rofheart, the most prominent candidate for the Woman’s mother, voicing the mother’s instructions to her daughter (such as the darkly humorous line, “Don’t sit on concrete, your ovaries will get cold”). And Woman could also consist of Howard Leder, playing the majority of the men’s roles, where the masculine in this world is coldly distant, silent in its brutality, or in a deadpan delivery drawing amusement from the audience, hilarious in its unawareness in giving instructions on how to parallel park.
Photo by frank ishman
All these scenes seem to add up to a life that, while portrayed intimately in its details, still feels alienated in the world and to the audience. Rofheart’s “character” (if you can label that part of the text as such) never moves from the seat at the darkened desk, casting a metaphorical shadow of an ever-present yet never-interacted-with mother. And Ettinger has a lovely, soothing voice—when glancing away from the pages, she also serves us lively facial expressions and reactions.
Yet I found myself craving more from the text and questioning the choice to leave the Woman character seemingly on book. Is the Woman a writer or otherwise an intellectual? Is the story so burdensome that it needs an additional interface of pages to separate us from the pain at the heart of these vignettes? From a literary standpoint, these words and images are beautiful, but seeing it performed, I found myself living in my head, the words washing over me, wondering about who the person was behind the text.
And that may be part of the intended effect. I also found myself yearning for more grounding from the playwright’s culture, simultaneously questioning if this world was meant to be a more anonymous post-communist country. The text referenced a former communist country and teaching Marxism, but that could be so much of not only Eastern Europe, but Asia or Latin America as well. I wondered if, from a translation standpoint, there were more words from the original language that could culturally ground the text, or if from a design point, more references to the original culture of the text and its author could be included in the musical transitions or projections—not to exotify, but more to ground an audience member.
Or perhaps that is part of the whole point, that even if the playwright is identified as Serbian, the region has dealt with such a variety of labels, conflict, and grief that perhaps the priority of this performance is not culture, but rather womanhood, the multiplicity of a woman’s life, and the entanglement between mother, daughter, and other knotted ancestral ties and norms packaged up as folk culture to keep us safe. Furthermore, Director Beth F. Milles notes in the program that the piece is written as a “long tone poem” with no punctuation, and so the possibilities for this text are immense. And perhaps this immense tension is what ultimately underlies the piece—that while there are so many possibilities in life, it might still end in a strangely alluring yet alienating mystery.
Atwater Village Theatre is located at 3269 Casitas Ave in Los Angeles, CA 90039. Parking is free is in the ATX (Atwater Crossing) parking lot one block south of the theater.
To purchase tickets and for more information call (323) 882-6912 or go to www.openfist.org.
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The Frontier Café – Conversation with Ines Tanović
The history and future of Balkan Cinema
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This episode of Frontier Cafe features a conversation with Ines Tanović, the manager of the production company DOKUMENT and the Sarajevo Film Center. The conversation, in Serbo-Croatian, went over her career as a filmmaker, the history of Yugoslav cinema, and her current efforts to promote local Balkan film cultures and auteurs.
Note: This interview is in the Bosnian language (download the English translation here).
About the Guest
Born in Sarajevo in 1965, Ines Tanović graduated at the Dramaturgy Department of the Sarajevo Academy of Performing Arts. She has been a member of the Association of Filmmakers of BiH since 1988. In 1991, with her father, Sejfudin Tanović, she founded a production called DOKUMENT in Sarajevo, which is now managed by her and Alem Babić, a producer. From 2014 to 2019, she was the president of the Association of Filmmakers of the FBiH and of the Association of Filmmakers of BiH. She is currently holding a position of acting general manager of the Sarajevo Film Centre. From 1986 to 2002, she wrote scripts and directed 6 short fiction movies. She worked as an editor at national and federal public broadcasting stations. In 2004, she was awarded by the Hubert Bals Fund for the script for “Entanglement”. She attended the Berlinale Talent Campus 2006 and her project “Decision” was selected among 160 entries from all over the world, for Berlin Today Award 2011.
In 2010, she directed the Bosnian part of the long feature omnibus “Some Other Stories” (coproduced by BiH, Serbia, North Macedonia, Slovenia, Croatia, and Ireland, supported by EURIMAGES). The film has been invited to more than 40 international festivals and earned six international awards. She is the author of a short film titled “Starting Over”, screened in the short film competition section of the 16th Sarajevo Film Festival in 2010. The film has been shown at many international festivals. Her film “Our Everyday Life” has been shown at more than 45 international film festivals and has earned 15 awards. The film was selected as a Bosnian and Herzegovinian entry for the 2015 Academy Awards.
She is the author of documentaries titled “Exhibition” (shown at the SHORT CORNER of the 2009 Cannes festival), “Living Monument” (2012), “Coal Mine” (2012), “Ghetto 59” (2013), and “A Day on the Drina” (2011), which was rewarded with the Big Stamp Award for Best Film of the 2012 ZagrebDox International Documentary Film Festival, and it was screened as a competing documentary at the 2012 Sarajevo Film Festival. Her second film “Son” premiered in the Competition Program – Feature Film at the 25th Sarajevo Film Festival (2019). The script for this film was awarded as the best project of the 2015 CineLink, and the most promising European project, as voted by LA producers, at the 2016 SEEfest LA. It has been screened at numerous international festivals.
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The Frontier Café – Conversation with George Csicsery
“Bringing mathematics to nonmathematical audiences.”
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In this episode of the Frontier Café, Michael Pardy hosts a discussion with SEEFest Jury alum, writer, and prolific filmmaker George Csicsery. Csicsery and his production company, Zala Films are based in Oakland, California.
In this wide-ranging discussion, George talks about his journey from an undergrad majoring in comparative religion to his life’s work as a journalist and filmmaker and the inherent challenges and rewards in making and financing his films. He also discusses some of his latest projects, including the remarkably poignant Secrets of the Surface: The Mathematical Vision of Maryam Mirzakhani (2020) and his still-in-production, Journeys of Black Mathematicians.
About the Guest
GEORGE PAUL CSICSERY, a writer and independent filmmaker, has produced 35 documentaries on historical, ethnographic, and cultural subjects, including “Where the Heart Roams” (1987), “Hungry for Monsters” (2003), “Troop 214” (2008). “The Thursday Club” (2005), and “Songs Along A Stony Road” (2011).
He is best known for his films on mathematical topics, including N is a Number: A Portrait of Paul Erdős (1993), Julia Robinson and Hilbert’s Tenth Problem, (2008), Hard Problems: The Road to the World’s Toughest Math Contest (2008), Taking the Long View: The Life of Shiing-shen Chern (2011), Counting from Infinity (2015), Navajo Math Circles (2016), and Secrets of the Surface: The Mathematical Vision of Maryam Mirzakhani (2020). In 2009 he received the Joint Policy Board for Mathematics (JPBM) Communications Award for “bringing mathematics to nonmathematical audiences.” In 2017-2019 he was Presidential Fellow at Chapman University.
See www.zalafilms.com for more.
Connect with George Csicery on Social Media
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The Frontier Café – Conversation with Dr. Ali İğmen
The history and future of Balkan Cinema
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On this episode of Frontier Cafe, host Milan Zivkovic chatted with Dr. Ali İğmen, one of his favorite History professors at California State University at Long Beach (CSULB). The conversation touched on representation in film, cinema as ideology, and current films that caught our attention (for better or worse). Please enjoy the discussion merging historical perspectives with film!
About the Guest
Dr. Ali İğmen s a Professor of Central Asian History and the Director of the Oral History Program at California State University, Long Beach (CSULB). His book, Speaking Soviet with an Accent: Culture and Power in Kyrgyzstan, was published by the “Central Asia in Context Series” of the University of Pittsburgh Press in July 2012 and was a finalist for the best book award of the Central Eurasian Studies Society.
His most recent article, “Intimate Publics, Looking Back and Looking Abroad,” will appear in the collected volume Tulips in Bloom, An Anthology of Central Asian Literature, co-edited by Gabriel McGuire, Naomi Caffee, Emily Laskin, Samuel Hodgkin, and Christopher Fort.
He received his doctorate from the University of Washington in Seattle in 2004 and, as a post-doctorate visiting scholar, taught at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. He also taught classes at Kyrgyz National University in Bishkek, Osh State University in Osh, Kyrgyzstan, and Boğaziçi University in Istanbul, Turkey.
Many awards helped İğmen support his research on Kyrgyzstan, such as Fulbright Hays, SSRC, and Mellon Slavic Studies Initiative Grant.
Making Culture in (Post) Socialist Central Asia, co-edited with Ananda Breed and Eva-Marie Dubuisson, London: Palgrave Pivot, Palgrave McMillan Book Series, 2020.
Connect with Dr. Ali İğmen on Social
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The Frontier Café – Conversation with Daylyn Paul
Working in a Post-Covid Film Industry
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In this episode of Frontier Cafe, host Milan Zivkovic spoke with fellow CSULB alum Daylyn Paul, a writer and filmmaker based out of Los Angeles. Recorded at Aroma Cafe in Los Angeles, Daylyn and Milan discuss working in a post-Covid film industry, historical representation in films, and how writers function in various productions. We hope you enjoy this discussion between two peers branching into different paths!
About The Guest
Daylyn Paul is a director and writer based out of Los Angeles. A graduate of California State University Long Beach and a recipient of the HFPA directing and writing grant, Daylyn has over eight years of experience in the entertainment industry. She currently works at CBS and ABC as a production assistant. Her previous works include the short film Nothing There Sings (2019) and the TV movie Suggestion Box (2019). Additionally, Daylyn was a casting assistant for the 2019 short film Flawless. She also works as a writer for an Amazon podcast set to release later in 2022.
Connect with Daylyn Paul on Social
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The Frontier Café – Conversation with Elma Tataragić
The History of Bosnian Cinema and the Role of Memory in Cinema
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This episode features a conversation with Elma Tataragić. Elma currently works as a selector for the Competition Program for the Sarajevo Film Festival and is the President of the Filmmakers Association of Bosnia and Herzegovina. During our talk, we touched upon the history of Bosnian cinema, her work with film students, and the role of memory in film. Please enjoy our conversation demonstrating the untapped potential of films and their impact on local and global communities!
NOTE: The language spoken in this interview is Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian (link to English translation or watch on YouTube with English captions)
About The Guest
Elma Tataragić (1976) is a scriptwriter, professor and festival programmer. She graduated Dramaturgy (Screenwriting and History of Cinema) at Sarajevo Academy of Performing Arts and obtained her Master of Science degree and PhD in Film and Literature. She has been with Sarajevo Film Festival since it was founded in 1995, where she now works as selector for Competition Programs and CineLink Industry Days.
She co-wrote short film First Death Experience (2001) and wrote and produced short North Went Mad (2003), both directed by Aida Begić. She has produced and co-written the feature film Snow (2008) also directed by A. Begić, shown in the Semaine de la critique at Cannes Film Festival 2008, where the film won the Grand Prix. The film has been shown at over 80 festivals and won over 30 international awards. She is the General Secretary and a member of Filmmakers Association of Bosnia and Herzegovina. She has been teaching screenwriting at Sarajevo Academy of Performing Arts since 2002, now as a professor.
She is member of European Film Academy and has published a book on screenwriting and is also works as a script consultant. In 2016 she has completed her short fiction film I Remember, which is successfully touring the world film festivals. The feature film When The Day Had No Name (2017) directed by Teona Mitevska which she has co-written premiered in Panorama Special at Berlinale 2017. She is currently in preproduction of two feature films she has written: Stitches to be directed by Serbia director Miroslav Terzić and God Exists And Her Name Is Petrunija by Macedonian director Teona Mitevska. She’s also developing a new feature and short experimental films.
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The Frontier Café – Conversation with Marek Šulík and Jana Belišová
The Interplay Between Music and Film
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This episode features Slovakian documentary filmmakers Marek Šulík and Jana Belišová. The host, Milan Zivkovic, and the duo discussed their works with Roma music, how film functions as a means of cultural diplomacy, and honest cinema depicting minority voices.
About the Guests
Marek Šulík (1974, Žilina, Slovakia), documentary filmmaker, editor and screenwriter, graduated from the Academy of Musical Arts in Bratislava in Dušan Hanák’s class. He often collaborates on films with non-profit organizations (Media 3, Návrat, IVO, Občan a demokracia, Žudro). In his work, he mainly focuses on social documentaries.
Filmography: Heavy Heart, Bells of Happiness, Cans of Time, I wanted to be a Mother, Cigarettes & Songs.
Jana Belišová, Ph.D. (1965), graduated in 1990 in the field of ethnology and musicology at the Faculty of Arts of Comenius University in Bratislava, Slovakia. Presently she works at the Institute of Musicology of the SAS in Bratislava and is the director of CA Žudro. As an author and researcher she was involved in several projects dealing with Roma music such as Phurikane giľa 1and 2 (Ancient Roma Songs), Karačoňa (Roma Christmas Songs), Odi kaľi mačkica (Roma Children Songs), Neve giľa (New Roma Songs), AfterPhurikane (creative dialogue among Roma and non-Roma musicians and singers), Roma Christian Songs, Silalo panori / Cold Water are represented by anthologies of songs, CDs, DVDs, documentary films, concerts, articles and lectures.
Roma music was used by permission of Jana Belišová. We are grateful to her and the civil association Žudro, for sharing these beautiful musical gems with us and our audiences.
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The Frontier Café – Conversation with Fareed Ben-Youssef
The history and future of Balkan Cinema
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In this first episode of The Frontier Café, host Milan Zivkovic had the pleasure to chat with Dr. Fareed Ben-Youssef, an Assistant Professor in Film and Media at Texas Tech University.
‘We primarily discussed the 2017 film Jupiter’s Moon, directed by Kornél Mundruczó, a Hungarian picture about a Syrian refugee with superpowers who lands in Hungary. Throughout our conversation, we discussed the history of the nation-state, religion, and race in the media. I hope you enjoy our stimulating foray into Jupiter’s Moon and beyond!’
Prefer video? Watch it here.
About Dr. Fareed Ben-Youssef
Dr. Fareed Ben-Youssef is an Assistant Professor in Film & Media at Texas Tech University. He earned his Ph.D. in Film and Media from the University of California, Berkeley. His first project, No Jurisdiction: The Law and Post-9/11 Genre Film, reveals and wrestles with the genre’s multivalent purpose as a tool to normalize state violence and as a potential mode of human rights critique.
His work on global cinema has appeared in journals such as The Journal of Popular Culture and Southwestern American Literature. As part of his efforts to teach outside the classroom, Ben-Youssef has organized myriad university film series and hosted master classes with award-winning directors such as Ari Folman and Ryûsuke Hamaguchi.
No Jurisdiction: Legal, Political, and Aesthetic Disorder in Post-9/11 Genre Cinema
Publisher: State University of New York Press, 2022
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