Exhibition
Liberating Cinema
Film Series 2024
Liberating Cinema is honoured to launch The Liberating Cinema Film Series 2024, inviting you to join the UK-wide programme dedicated to 120 Years of Serbian cinema and 95 Years since the birth of the director Aleksandar Petrović. Our programme will tour London, St Andrews, and Edinburgh from 23 November to 1 December 2024. We would like to thank our partners The Cameo Picturehouse, Close Up Film Centre and St Andrews Film Festival for kindly hosting this retrospective and Avala Film Way and Delta Video, Belgrade for generously providing the films included in this programme.
Through this link you can also discover our programme from early 2024: Innocence Unprotected: Reframing the World through Yugoslav Cinema showcases Yugoslav films of the 1960s, reframing our perception of rejection, community, creation, and love. In partnership with The Serbian Council of Great Britain (Serbian Month 2024).
Film Series 2022
Liberating Cinema is honoured to launch The Liberating Cinema Film Series Programme 2022, inviting you to join our most comprehensive, exciting, and collaborative edition to date. Experience masterpieces from the archives, discover key pioneers for the first time, and participate in reframing our understandings of cinema as we dig in through the vaults of film history. Join us on our journey as we uncover precious gems from Suomi-Filmi: The Finnish Studio System to Post-War Yugoslav Cinema, East German Westerns to the Cinema of Morocco. Learn about the art of cinematography first-hand from Swiss filmmaker Fabrice Aragno, pioneer of 3D technology and the cinematographer of the late films of Jean-Luc Godard, share experiences with our Guest Curator Jari Sedergren (National Audiovisual Institute Finland), and if being online becomes simply too much, then join us in person and meet celebrated auteur Ahmed El Maanouni as he holds our Masterclass in Directing in London.
Film Series 2021
Liberating Cinema is delighted to launch The Liberating Cinema Film Series Programme for 2021, bringing you a range of new discoveries, hidden gems, and sincere masterpieces from the history of world cinema. From the silent era to present day, join us for our double programme in our ninth and final week on 15th November, beginning with Classical Bulgarian Cinema with Prof. Alexander Donev from 18:00 UK time and finishing with New Korean Cinema with Dr Connor McMorran and film curator Eric Choi from 20:00 UK time.
KARAĐORĐE: The 110th Anniversary Symposium
Guest of Honour
HRH Crown Prince Aleksandar of Serbia
Liberating Cinema is honoured to host the 110th Anniversary Symposium of the first Serbian feature film The Life and Deeds of the Immortal Vožd Karađorđe (Čiča Ilija Stanojević, 1911) and has the great privilege to present His Royal Highness Crown Prince Aleksandar Karađorđević of Serbia as our Guest of Honour for this 110th Anniversary Symposium. The Symposium held on 23rd October 2021 can be viewed via our YouTube Channel. We are grateful to His Royal Highness, the Royal House of Karađorđević, and the Royal Palace in Belgrade. The restored film is made available, courtesy of Jugoslovenska Kinoteka/Yugoslav Cinematheque, Belgrade.
The Development of Film Language in Serbia during the Silent Era
On the 6th June 1896 the first film screening on the Balkan Peninsula took place on the luxurious Terazije Square in Belgrade. From its very introduction at the end of the nineteenth century cinema was recognised as a novel form in Serbia and over the next twenty years some of the greatest innovations would take place, in a most unconventional way, and it is many of these that would come to characterize the development of film language in the country and abroad.
The Holocaust in the Czechoslovak New Wave
From the resistance in František Čáp’s Men without Wings (1946) to the images of camps in Alfred Radok’s Distant Journey (1948), Czechoslovak cinema almost immediately began to deal with the history and legacy of the Holocaust as the Second World War came to an end.
Archives
Mina Radovic founded, directed, and curated the Liberating Cinema Film Series since 2015 at the Department of Film Studies of the University of St Andrews, with the aim “to encourage debates and lively interaction between students, staff and scholars on a diverse range of cinematic works and topics”. Since 2019 the Film Series has taken place at the University of London and is expanding to include further Higher Education Institutions across the UK.
Programme Posters
Timeline
2019
2018
2017
2016
2015
Regular contributors to date include Professor Dina Iordanova, Dr Sanghita Sen, and Dr Connor McMorran. Liberating Cinema would like to thank Second Run for their annual contribution to the Series together with the British Film Institute, the Yugoslav Cinematheque, the Slovenian Film Centre, Curzon, Arrow Academy, the Byre Theatre, the Department of Film Studies (St Andrews), the Department of English and Comparative Literature (Goldsmiths), the Ritwik Memorial Trust (India) and the Ritwik Ghatak family.
