Film Center Serbia supported four projects last year in a competition to co-finance the production of domestic feature films. One of those projects, Dean Radonović’s Instru Mental, has just recieved support in Estonia.
The Serbian project was supported by the Estonian Film Institute’s just-completed competition, and has been awarded 50,000 euros in funding for co-financing minority co-productions. In its explanation, the Estonian commission described this debut as “a bold experimental film about media manipulation”. It also states that “the central conflict in Instru Mental stems from a contradiction between objective and subjective reality, in which truth is vague and distorted, where no viewpoint is reliable and paranoia prevails. Although the story is surreal and episodic and communicates mostly through visual means and minimal dialogue, the theme is clear and the style is coherent and uniform. And most importantly – the views, beliefs and the message of the author are clear and ubiquitous.”
The existing synopsis of the film reveals the following: Dragan Petrović, the editor of the tabloid “Instrumental”, recieves a new target from his superior – his eccentric neighbor Boris. Dragan immediately, routinely, creates a series of fake news: the daily is read all over Serbia and spreads panic through anncouncing a spy-terror plot and accuses Boris of being the main conspirator. Suddenly, one of Petrović’s random lies becomes true and is then carried by the media all over the world as a “fact.” Step by step, Petrović loses the ability to differentiate reality from fiction fabricated by the media conglomerate that he serves.
The Serbian producer of Instru Mental is a young production company, Zero Point, led by Ramona Plazinić, and Estonian co-producer Veli Rajasar (Münchhausen Productions) has already collaborated with Dean Radovanović on the forty-minute film Fisherman’s Singing (2019). Radovanovic is best known so far for his short films Either Words Nor Quiet (2012) and “Paradigm (2015).
Radovanović described his project in a directorial explication like this: “Today it is more clear than ever that truth is a concept created in favor of concentrated power structures, that the political-media complex is constantly subverting that truth, and that paranoia against such a system of lies and deception is more than justified. However, this paranoia is also dangerous and contagious, it opens an endless swirl of doubt and delusion, insecurity about the world around and itself, and the individual is overwhelmed with contradictions and thrown down a kind of abyss of modern times. This is a movie about living in a fabricated reality, a movie that constantly changes gears as it rushes down the backdrop of delusions and deceptive perceptions, under the eye of a paranoid camera that distorts and instructs the mind of both the characters in the film and their audience. Instru Mental is planned to be a Serbo-Croatian-Estonian-Portuguese co-production, and this, it should be noted, is also the first instance of co-production between Serbia and Estonia.