Balkan Film Week 2024

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Resilience is often used in connection to two notions, power and material. The action implies when a force is exercised or applied against another matter, without being able to permanently change its substance. One of its definitions offered by Cambridge dictionary states resilience as ‘’the ability of a substance to return to its usual shape after being bent, stretched, or pressed.’’

Leading from here, I propose thinking about resilience in relation to corporality and its capacity to sustain under difficult environments and conditions. Corpus here directly translates to human bodies and their capacity to bend, and move, but regain their composure. The category of vulnerability that ascribes the body’s materiality is a focus of investigation in the volume ‘’Vulnerability in Resistance’’, edited by Judith Butler, Zeynep Gambetti, and Leticia Sabsay. In the book, the authors investigate ways of mobilizing personal and collective urgencies to reframe the vulnerable in relation to being resistant. As Sarah Bracke in the volume writes that “resilience, in short, is a powerful idea whose deployment spans the macro-level of ecological and economic systems to the micro level of selves, and the complex circuits of power that connect and constitute these different levels of social reality”[1]. Although the author discusses resilience as a mobilizing neoliberal mechanism in relation to social categories, such as gender, the resilience is positioned in relation to resistance. Unlike resilience, where matter jumps back into shape after a pressured influence, resistance implies, as the Cambridge dictionary suggests, ‘’the act of fighting against something that is attacking you, or refusing to accept something’’ or ‘’a force that acts to stop the progress of something or make it slower’’ or ‘’a situation in which people or organizations fight against something or refuse to accept or be changed by something’’. Therefore, to resist is an act to counter, while resilience signifies endurance.

Both categories, resistance and resilience, assist in thinking about the Balkan films and their choice to focus on the ways the bodies have been resisting under the historical socio-political rhythm and its leftover consequences. The characters that mirror the region’s inhabitants, although resilient do not all rebound from their initial states, minds nor bodies. Some get locked in the different form, shifted, and bent. Continuing from Bracke: ‘’In precarious times, resilience is the new security[2].’’ For the Balkans, resilience is a virtue one is born into. When in this year’s film ‘’Museum of the Revolution’’ the main protagonist expresses her desire to become a butterfly by saying “If I need to walk, I fly instead. Sometimes I walk, sometimes I fly”, she brings on a powerful way of dealing with her weighty life. Metaphorically, she aspires to resist the conditions she bears by transforming herself and the women that surround her.

This year, Balkan Film Week honours all alive that serve as monuments to resilience in their everyday as well as joint historical battles, but also those who passed away. The resilience that Balkan inhabitants embody historically, is opposite from generalisation or exoticism that has been stamped on its collective body. This year’s films talk about resilience, and also resistance, in form of revolutions, governmental but also personal, and the entwining spaces between these two scopes: affecting, twisting and conditioning. In this respect, the festival opens with Srđan Keča and Vlad Petri’s films that offer a lens between these two categories. The second day of the festival opens with topics surrounding heritage and its resilient persistence that holds its shape through time. How do we work with tradition? Is loyalty to tradition inadequate, can it be resisted or reformatted, and if so, how can the conditions be negotiated? The tradition cannot, or maybe even should not, be destroyed. However, how this conversation is negotiated is shown through examples provided by the directors Smirna Kulenović, Vincent Moon and Fatime Kosumi, as well as Marija Zidar. The third day of the festival brings the notion of resilience back to the human body, and to the experience of pain, but also in connection to community in general, as well as to family in detail. Understanding the human connection as one of the most resilient notions, we turn to the awarded stories by Marko Šantić and Juraj Lerotić. The final day of the festival adds a note of humour to the matter, and to the weighty social conditions under which the characters of the films ‘’Secret Ingredient’’ and ‘’Blaga’s Lessons’’ resist, i.e. operate under. In these films, the directors Gjorce Stavreski and Stephan Komandarev display ways in which the movies’ protagonists, even as they are affected by their political and social state of affairs, manage to move around, and against the obstacles.

We humans have an insatiable desire to live and sustain. The movements that human bodies make, strive to express a range of emotions. Creativity, the force through which the human condition resists, expands and collects all on their journey. Whether by transforming into butterflies, raising fists in the air, hurting their bodies to feel, being heard through a song, or by making films, the power to express resists and transforms as we move through different ebbs of life.

[1] Bracke, Sarah. ‘’Bouncing Back. Vulnerability and Resistance in Times of Resilience.’’ Vulnerability in Resistance, edited by Judith Butler, Zeynep Gambetti, and Leticia Sabsay. Duke University Press, Durham and London, 2016, p.52.

[2] Bracke, Sarah, ‘’Bouncing Back. Vulnerability and Resistance in Times of Resilience’’ in Vulnerability in Resistance. Edited by Judith Butler, Zeynep Gambetti, and Leticia Sabsay. Duke University Press, Durham and London, 2016, p.57.