The 43rd edition of the Göteborg Film Festival, Sweden’s most significant festival, will begin on Friday, 24th of January, and Serbian films and Serbian minority co-productions will be present in in multiple selections and program sections.
The Göteborg audiences will thus be able to watch the new feature documentary by Mladen Kovačević; his film Merry Christmas, Yiwu is an intimate film about the everyday life of Chinese workers, caught between the communist tradition and the newly established Chinese dream of success, taking us to Yiwu, a city with 600 factories in which Christmas is being produced for the whole world. Writer and director is Mladen Kovačević, producers are Iva Plemić Divjak, Mario Adamson and Rut Reid, and co-producers are Jasmina Sijeričic, Hajno Dekert and Thierry Detej. The editor is Jelena Maksimovćc, director of photography Marko Milovanović. The composer is Olof Dreijer. The design and mix of the sound is by Patrik Stromdal, and post-production sound assistant isPavle Kovacevic. This will be the Nordic premiere of this film, followint its world premiere at the Rotterdam International Film Festival, where tickets for all screenings were sold out. Kovačević’s new film is part of the Nordic Light programme.
The short animated film “Light and Shadows” by Rastko Ćirić will have its world premiere at the festival. It is an adaptation of Goethe’s Faust, in which the main character sells his shadow to the Devil.
Rastko Ćirić wrote the script, directed, designed and animated the film. Additional animation was done by Iva Ćirić, who is also the producers, alongside Milan Stojanović. Sound editing and design are by Svetolik Mica Zajc and the composer is Nebojša Ignjatović.
The festival will also host two notable Serbian minority co-productions; the documentary by Ivana Mladenović, Ivana the Terrible, coproduced with Romania. The film was awarded at Locarno IFF, and in Zagreb it won the main festival award. Thef film will be cometing in the Ingmar Bergman Competition.
There is also a multi-award-winning feature-length documentary The Diary of Diana Budisavljević, directed by Dana Budisavljević, co-produced by Croatia, Slovenia and Serbia. The winner of the Pula Film Festival, with six awards, is the true story of an Austrian citizen married to an Orthodox Christian doctor in Zagreb who, during World War II, saved more than 10,000 Serb children from Croatian death camps. Diana kept a detailed record of children’s destinies, which she would be stripped of after the war by the communist authorities in 1945 when her German and civic background became undesirable. Thanks to Diana’s diary, which was found by her grandson after her death, the heroic role of this woman came to light. The film will be screened in the Five Continents programme.
All four films were created with the support of Film Center Serbia.