During the first nine days of July, the new, 56th edition of the A category film festival will take place in the prestigious Czech resort of Karlovy Vary, and the Serbian feature documentary “Another Spring” by Mladen Kovačević will be a part of the newly launched Proxima competition program will be. This will be the world premiere of our film, the creation of which was supported by Film Center Serbia, and a new great success for our film industry.
“Another Spring” focuses on the smallpox epidemic in Yugoslavia in 1972. According to the synopsis of the film: from a bazaar in Iraq, the deadly virus travels unnoticed in Yugoslavia. The infection spread for a whole month before it was discovered in Kosovo, while the number of infected people in Belgrade hospitals continued to increase unhindered. How is it possible that the biggest post-war epidemic of the most deadly disease in human history hit Yugoslavia? A disease that killed 500 million people in the 20th century alone. Even today, smallpox, or variola vera is the only deadly virus that man has managed to eradicate, which is considered one of the greatest achievements of our civilization. In the ten-year struggle with smallpox that united the whole world, the Yugoslav epidemic in 1972, as the last epidemic of smallpox in Europe, is remembered as one of the most inspiring and exciting stories.
Mladen Kovačević is the screenwriter and director, the director of photography is Stefan Đorđević, the film was edited by Jelena Maksimović, the composer and supervisor of sound editing is Jakov Munižaba and the producer is Iva Plemić Divjak. The film was produced by Horopter Film Production, and the national co-producers of the film are the Serbian Radio and Television and Cinnamon Production. The film is co-produced by Bocalupo Films from France. Along with Film Center Serbia, the film was also supported by the Doha Film Institute.
The project of this Serbian documentary in April last year won an award under the “VdR-Industry 2021” program, the industrial part of the 52nd edition of the Visions du Réel (VdR) Documentary Film Festival in Nyon, Switzerland.