The Other Side of Everything. 2017. Serbia/France. Directed by Mila Turajlic. 104 min.
Mila Turajlić’s masterful follow-up to her critically acclaimed debut (Cinema Komunisto) puts the filmmaker’s opposition-activist mother and the childhood apartment in Belgrade where the family still lives at the center of a documentary inquiry into the collapse of Yugoslavia, the overthrow of Slobodan Milošević, and the lifespan of political revolutions. Srbijanka Turajlić, a retired engineering professor and prominent dissident in Serbia, speaks frankly and eloquently about her role as a progressive organizer during the anti-regime student protests of the 1990s, and her disenchantment with the promised—if unrealized—changes to the country’s mechanisms of government. Meanwhile, changes are afoot in the apartment, which was partitioned into two after the socialist regime decided it was too big a home for only one family. With the imminent reunification of the apartment’s various rooms, mother and daughter reflect on the transformations both at home and in the country around them. Courtesy of Icarus Films