Pera presents Yugoslav experimental film

Pera Film’s “Forms and Politics of Yugoslav Experimental Film” program brings together lesser known films made by artists in socialist Yugoslavia between 1963 and 1987. 

The program will be held between March 10 and 12.

Its first section, “Film as Research,” is dedicated to the idea of experimental films produced in relation to the legendary Genre Experimental Film Festival launched in 1963 in Zagreb. That festival brought together Yugoslavia’s most progressive filmmakers and theoreticians and was dedicated to the formal understanding of film as a methodology of researching reality. 

The second section, “The Power of Abstraction,” contains films produced by artists as well as experimental amateurs, or outsiders, developing their own style of filmmaking between alternative and formal filmmaking.

The films in this section use the abstraction and subjectivity of experimental forms to advance our understanding of social dynamics, political changes and history.

Program curator Sezgin Boynik will also give a talk on the specific conditions of experimental filmmaking in socialist Yugoslavia and Eastern Europe, contextualizing the historical and social situation in which the featured films were produced.