"I was born in 1979, a year old when Tito died and was 11 years old when Milosevic came to power, 12 when the war in the former Yugoslavia started, 16 when it finished, 20 when NATO bombed us, 21 when we finally got rid of Milosevic, 24 when our Prime Minister was assassinated, and today at the ripe old age of 37, I want to speak of my country, from a very personal angle, and from a very precise point of departure - the place where I live. Why from there? Because I have been privileged to grow up observing Serbia through the beliefs and actions of a woman who thought it her responsibility to speak up about things that were happening in it. Because my mother and I have always shared this language of politics - she was a student leader in 1968, and so was I in the 90-ties. Because my family home was the gathering place for intellectual discussions, activist meetings and often just refuge from the madness taking place outside. Because this home is in the center of Belgrade and the things happening in Serbia today. Because the more I stare at the locked doors in our living room that I have been faced with all my life, more I realize how much about Serbia can be understood by talking about divided spaces. Between those seeking to rewrite the past, and those attempting to acknowledge it. And a way of understanding my mother's life is her attempts at bridging this divide."
Mila Turajlić is the director/producer/writer of The Other Side of Everything, which premiered at TIFF in 2017. It went on to win 14 awards, including the prestigious IDFA Award for best documentary film. Her first feature doc, Cinema Komunisto played at over 80 festivals (Tribeca, IDFA, Hot Docs) and won 16 awards. She studied politics at the London School of Economics, and film production at the national film school in Belgrade, specializing in documentary filmmaking at La Fémis in Paris. Mila Turajlić obtained her PhD at the University of Westminster on the subject of cinema and politics, and is a lecturer at universities (Sorbonne, Harvard University, Stanford) as well as documentary training programs (Archidoc, BDC). Since 2006 she has been the director of Dribbling Pictures, a production company she founded with Boris Mitić.
