Museum of the Revolution
a film by SRĐAN KEČA
Press
“To safeguard the truth about us, were the words architect Richter used, when he presented his plan for a Museum of the Revolution to be built in Belgrade in 1961… Director Srđan Keča takes this — with great propaganda archive material — as the starting point for his version of the truth as he sees it in a film that is quite as unconventional as Richter wanted the museum to be.”
“Keča works with several layers surrounding three people, who live in and around the basement of the museum, that is what was left of a vision, conveyed in magic luminous sequences of light coming in to the place, light spots of hope, where Milica and her mother Vera stay together with the old woman Mara, who has no contact to her daughter, whom she “gave away” to the social system. In the darkness of poverty they are. Keča stresses this with compassion, when his camera caresses them, often by taking away the sound staying long on their faces. The love relationship between Milica and her mother is beautiful, their life is a constant struggle to survive as polishers of car windows to earn some money to send to the father, who is in prison. The architectural point of view stays in the picture: modern conventional ugly buildings are constructed now in Belgrade along the river of Sava. Keča paints with his camera in a film that asks the question: Is this what we want to safeguard?” — Tue Steen Müller, Filmkommentaren.dk
“Keča observes the lives of these three women with an astutely poetic eye. Young Milica boldly takes charge of the situation and guides her mother, Vera, through the streets of Belgrade. They wash windshields energetically as cars pass by on the busy road that borders their zone on the periphery from the developments that rise all around them.”
“Museum of the Revolution is an immersive experience that allows viewers to enter the spaces the women inhabit and witness with intimate immediacy the precariousness with which they live day by day.“
“Making shrewd use of long takes, stillness, and silence, the film is a thoughtful meditation on homelessness and survival. Neither objectifying nor sentimentalizing the stories of Milica, Vera, and Mara, the film is a frank look at life on the margins. If the abandoned Museum of the Revolution was meant to be a sign of progress, the film invites viewers to consider the hopes for a society that stands memorialized as a chasm of forgotten dreams.” — Pat Mullen, POV Magazine
"Neither [the protagonists] nor the film report in detail how they all got into this situation. There are clues, and yet Museum of the Revolution leaves the three women with their stories in this taciturn milieu, leaves them enigmatic as we follow their movements through the Serbian capital, past the illuminated houses they cannot afford to rent, and the concerts with projection shows to which they are not invited. Again and again, the camera returns with them to the dimness of the ruins, a place that assembles many other smaller places where rubble is constantly piling up, where dust falls and water drips.”
“With Keča, it is not language that is in the foreground, but a certain atmosphere, the materiality of a late capitalist society whose foundations are in danger of collapsing. (...) Maybe that's what makes the film so interesting: that it is interested in processes of decay and passing on different levels and puts them less in relation to one another than it is up to the viewer to build meaning from their fragments."
"The seasons come and go in this film. Where there was just snow, two friends are now lying singing by the water. Soon a concert hall will be built above the basement as a meeting place for the citizens, soon Mara will die, and soon Milica will go to school. Her father, who only appears on the phone, is about to be released from prison. 'So time is a today, from a hundred years ago to now,' wrote Sasha Marianna Salzmann in the novel 'Außer sich' (2017) and thus gave a good indication of the time that makes this film describable: a film that knows about yesterday and the future, but celebrates and conserves a today that crumbles to dust the moment it becomes tangible and nameable." — Anne Küper, Critic.de (translated from German)
“Stylistically dreamlike and emotionally intimate… [Keča’s] film favours emotions over information, empathy over drama.”
“The film drifts in and out of the reportage approach, alternating with a more dreamlike state. Where image and sound get disconnected, and where shallow focus, slowly drifting takes, intimate close-ups, moody soundscapes and the absence of any voice-over help us to let go of our ‘news stance’ as spectators and instead engage emotionally with mother and daughter.” — Kees Driessen, Business Doc Europe
“Keča employs a strategy similar to that of another contemporary documentary master, the Italian Gianfranco Rosi, whose films are also about the marginalized and outsiders.”
“He spends a lot of time with his protagonists, slowly gaining and earning their trust, until the camera is hardly an actor in the action and is hardly noticed by those portrayed. There is no trace of suffering pornography in this film, no exploitation of poverty and pain. Keča doesn't film the central, important, sensational moments of these lives, he doesn't exploit his characters to get particularly 'authentic' or dramatic material (…) Through this process of omission, the moments we see seem like fragments of a larger whole, a larger world, a larger life and, of course, post-socialism.” — Philipp Stadelmaier, Die Zeit (translated from German)
“Srđan Keča’s wondrous film deals with the legacy of the former Yugoslavia depicted in a chronicle about a few homeless people living in a deserted space of a once-planned museum of the Yugoslav revolution.”
“The building plans were abandoned in the late ‘70s. Now, the deserted dark space of the shelter is used as a set for a story about people living there. The vast darkness in the beginning parallels the fate of the once existing country with the cruel destinies of people who simply could not acclimatise to the rules of capitalist greed of today’s post-socialist reality.”
“Underground and the Roma: a director we won’t mention here built his career on these two themes. Keča never even considers going in the same direction in order to exploit his characters and portray them in any stereotypical way. His view of today’s Serbia, its oppressed and marginalised groups and individuals, is diametrically different. People living underground today are exiled, disenfranchised, alienated. They do not fit into the exotic imagination framed as some kind of cinematic truth about the “dirty Balkans”, readymade for Western film festivals.” — Sanjin Pejković, Senses of Cinema
“Reflected in Keča’s gorgeous cinematography is an austere beauty where pockets of hope can be found within pain.”
“Museum of the Revolution is an intimate but painful watch. It captures heartache and frustration more often than it does the moments of joy between its mother and daughter subjects. It shows support systems governed by money and support systems governed by love. The latter serves the film’s purpose perfectly, illustrating a life that could exist without the financial stress that can ruin the happiest of lives and force people into poverty. Combined with the ease that Vera and Milica’s story can be found within many other cities, Museum of the Revolution displays a resilience in the face of adversity that maintains its relevance.” — Christopher Cross, Tilt Magazine
The thick atmosphere extends [throughout] thanks to Jakov Munižaba's oneiric sound design and Hrvoje Nikšić's ambient drone score, coupled with Keča's intimate, low-angle shots of the girl.
Near the end, Keča's camera is travelling on the river at night, filming the new development on the other bank of the Sava: the corrupt, indulgent Belgrade Waterfront project. This Dubai-style mirage (harking back to Keča's Ji.hlava 2012 winner Mirage) is yet another beginning that has so far managed only to deepen the ideological rift in this country of failed revolutions, incomplete reckoning with its past, and ordinary people living in subterranean circumstances, both psychologically and materially. — Vladan Petkovic, Cineuropa
Select Reviews
Die Zeit (DE) • Kino Zeit (DE) • epd Film (DE) • Filmdienst (DE) • Jungle World (DE) • Indiekino (DE) • BAF (DE) • ExBerliner (EN) • Vagabunda MX (ES) • Tilt Magazine (EN) • The Extra Mile (EN) • Screenfish (EN) • Ubiquarian (EN) • Cineuropa (EN) • Business Doc Europe (EN) • Universal Cinema (EN) • Cineuropa – Trailer Release (EN) • Film New Europe (EN) • Variety (EN) • Filmkommentaren.dk (EN) • Jutarnji List (HR) • Filmoskopija (SR) • Radio Sarajevo (BH)
Select Interviews
Point of View Magazine (EN) • Cineuropa (EN) • Courrier des Balkans (FR) • Fred FM (EN) • True Story Podcast (EN) • IDF Creative Dialogue Sessions (EN) • Portal Novosti (HR) • Blic (SR) • Danas (SR) • Kurir (SR)
