Liberating Cinema Film Series 2024

Liberating Cinema is honoured to announce 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.

In 1896 the first moving images were presented by representatives of the Lumière Brothers on Terazije Square in Belgrade, Kingdom of Serbia. In 1904 Serbian honorary consul Arnold Muir Wilson and film pioneer Frank Mottershaw shot The Coronation of King Peter I of Serbia and Travel through Serbia, Novi Pazar, Montenegro and Dalmatia (1904), the first motion picture about the Serbian people, history and culture and the oldest surviving film made on the Balkan peninsula. 

In 1929, 25 years later, Aleksandar Petrović was born in Paris and, returning to his ancestral Belgrade, would go on to become the most celebrated of all Serbian directors, the auteur who would define generations, with whom the fate of the Yugoslav Black Wave was inextricably tied from beginning to end, and the quiet yet singular artist who brought Yugoslav cinema to international acclaim. We mark this anniversary by screening landmark films that mark sixty years both ways and connect the world of 1904 with our present in 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. All images are courtesy of Delta Video, Belgrade.

Our Film Series is educational and free of charge, with the aim of facilitating dialogue between academia, archives, and the film industry and engaging them on a wide range of cinematic works and topics with our audiences across the UK and internationally.

W1 (23rd November) – It Rains in My Village (Aleksandar Petrović, 1968) – UK Premiere of the Restoration – Close Up Film Centre, London

Book your visit: https://www.closeupfilmcentre.com/film_programmes/2024/histoires-du-cinema/it-rains-in-my-village

At the height of the Black Wave – following international hit I Even Met Happy Gypsies – Petrović directed a poignant portrait of society inspired by Dostoevsky. It Rains in My Village follows a young man who marries a woman with psychological problems while the arrival of a teacher is overshadowed by the gypsy choir that sings about the end of the world.