Our new film SLET 1988 will premiere in the Concorso Corti d’Autore section of the 78th Locarno Film Festival, August 6 to 16, 2025, in Locarno, Switzerland.
https://www.locarnofestival.ch/festival/program/film.html?fid=d5201ec2-f9eb-44abbea8- 6128778efa07&eid=
It will premiere at Locarno as part of the Pardi di Domani lineup, a key section dedicated to cinematic experimentation and emerging voices.
Bodies, architecture, and ideas age differently while passing together through time.
Sonja Vukićević (74), a dancer and choreographer from Belgrade, is known for her anti-Milošević activism and her monumental solo at the final Youth Day celebration in Yugoslavia in 1988 – just before the fall of the Berlin Wall and the beginning of Yugoslav wars.
In a gymnastic hall in New Belgrade, a district emblematic of the utopian architecture of socialist modernism, Sonja trains her resilient, aging body—a body as an archive. Thirty-five years after the celebration, we see Sonja’s moving body, recalling the rhythms and voices of the past while surrounded by the echoes of present-day life. Her physical presence is juxtaposed with the audio archive of a teenage girl’s diary, recorded in this building block in 1988. It brings an intimate narrative of growing up amid the ideological shifts of a late socialist state. SLET 1988 revisits Yugoslavia’s final grand mass performance (‘slet’). Amid an onslaught of large and loud changes, there was another change: quiet yet fundamental – the transition from collectivism to individualism. The film captures the ‘glitch’ in a world caught between hope and uncertainty, between fading socialist collectivism and the promise of liberal individualism, while a new national collective body is creeping in and will soon shape the future of the country.
Director: Marta Popivoda; Co-writer: Ana Vujanović; Protagonist: Sonja Vukućević; DoP: Ivan Marković; Editor: Jelena Maksimović; Sound: Vladimir Živković; Producers: Marta Popivoda, Jasmina Sijerčić, Zsofi Lili Kovacs
