Alas,
revolutions often fail and one fallen regime usually just begets another that
is equally corrupt, or worse. Those are the archly fatalistic observations of Prof.
Srbijanka Turajlić—and she ought to know. She was a prominent leader in the
Otpor resistance that overthrew Slobodan Milosevic. Before that, her family was
branded suspicious bourgeoisie class elements by Tito’s Communists. In fact, her
subdivided family townhouse still bears the witness to the Communist era of
appropriation and plunder in Mila Turajlić’s highly personal documentary, The Other Side of Everything (trailer here), which screens
during the 2018 San Francisco International Film Festival.
For
Turajlić the personal is inescapably political, due to her mother’s activism.
She stood shoulder to shoulder with her students, because she refused to be as
passive as her parents had been when confronting injustice during the Communist
era. It started when a jackbooted internal security agent arrived unannounced,
consigning the large family to two rooms in their fashionable building. For
decades, their own neighbors spied on them through peep holes within their [formerly]
own home. As late as the mid 2010’s, Rada the nonagenarian is still holding on,
in the two grubby rooms right behind Srbijanka Turajlić’s walls.
Although
Other Side is ostensibly about family
history, it is a remarkably helpful document for making sense of the current
Serbian political climate. Partly, it is because Turajlić and her family have
had such a unique vantage point to observe Serbian and Yugoslav history. In
fact, her grandfather was a signatory to the original document creating Yugoslavia
as a unified political entity, decades before Tito’s rise to power. Nearly a
century later, he will play a small part in a tellingly ironic and symbolic
development when a grand oil painting of the ceremony is discovered, walled up
in the national legislature.
Most
of the time, Other Side should not
even be described as a two-hander, because Turajlić the filmmaker does her best
to keep herself behind the scenes. However, Prof. Turajlić is an undeniably
forceful personality, who easily commands the screen. Despite her disappointments,
she is still razor-sharp and actively engaged socially and politically (despite
her claims to the contrary).