From its opening shots of a Belgrade apartment building in dense fall fog, this documentary takes this structure—and especially the apartment that has been its director's lifelong home—as its primary subject. More broadly, Mila Turajlić uses the building and its inhabitants to examine the stormy past century of Serbian and Yugoslav history. The film's original material was shot over a number of years and depicts the building's exterior, its hallways, and the apartment itself. Its images are carefully composed, primarily shot on a tripod, and often include provoked exchanges, prompted by questions from the filmmaker. Many are posed by the director to her mother, Srbijanka Turajlić, a professor of mathematics and a prominent liberal dissident. In the first interior shot, Srbijanka cleans the heavy brass hardware of a set of double doors, which are locked. “So, you never had the impulse to turn that key?” asks Mila. “No!” responds Srbijanka. We soon learn that the apartment, which has housed four generations of Mila's family, was divided by socialist authorities following World War II. This family (which includes a number of prominent lawyers) lost half its residence when poorer “proletarian” families were moved into the “other side,” behind these closed doors.
Turajlić uses her family and its apartment—and in particular their encounters with the outside world—as a vehicle with which to explore the Serbian and Yugoslav pasts. The film takes up the formation of The Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes (the treaty for which was signed by her great grandfather, who also commissioned the building); the first Yugoslavia's collapse in WWII; the establishment of a socialist order that judged the family to have “too much of everything”; the decline of an encompassing Yugoslavism and the rise of nationalist sensibilities; tanks leaving Belgrade for the siege of separatist Croatia; former students coming home in body bags; international sanctions, hyperinflation, and political crisis; the NATO bombing of Serbia; and the popular uprising that brought down authoritarian President Slobodan Milošević. Srbijanka herself actively participated in this final chapter as a supporter of Otpor, the resistance movement which set the stage for the uprising. This history emerges from conversations within the apartment, archival images, and shots from out of the windows of the centrally-located apartment. In the latter, the film's careful cinematography is punctuated by unexpected events filmed in shakier handheld shots. We see crowds of nationalist protesters headed to burn the US Embassy following the 2008 recognition of statehood for the breakaway territory of Kosovo. We see glimpses of unruly everyday life in Belgrade, from a construction crane operator's repairs far above the rooftops (sans safety harness), to a traffic cop futilely “directing” traffic.
As the film develops, generational tensions emerge, in which Srbijanka's sense of political responsibility and ethical commitment contrast with the director's more disaffected outlook. At times, this reads as her desire to protect her mother from the dangers that courageous political engagement generates. At others, it seems to be a critique of quixotic attempts to resist authoritarian politics in Serbia, whether those of Slobodan Milošević, who bears so much of the responsibility for the violent undoing of Yugoslavia, or current populist president Aleksandar Vučić, once his Minister of Information. Srbijanka's roles include both fiery speeches in support of student protests (that lead to her firing) and an appointment in the Ministry of Education in the 2000 post-revolutionary government. This intergenerational dynamic, and the politics and subjective experiences of post-revolutionary disappointment, resonate strongly with the work of Jessica Greenberg, especially her After the Revolution (2014), and would pair well with this ethnography in courses on the region, or on postsocialism and revolution more generally. Alternately, the film would complement Marko Živković’s Serbian Dreambook (2011) in an urban studies course.
This remarkable and carefully-crafted film, with laurels from top film festivals, has one central shortcoming: its lack of self-critical engagement with its own bourgeois sensibilities and position. These sensibilities emerge perhaps first and foremost aesthetically. Shot after shot meditates on the material culture of Belgrade's tiny multigenerational urban elite, with images that caress the apartment's fine porcelain, cut glass, dark hand-carved furniture, tiled hallways, brass spy hole, and gold-plated grandfather clock. “If you don't show how well I polish the silver,” intones Srbijanka jokingly in one scene, “I'll kill you.” But class also emerges in the liberal, cosmopolitan, and individualistic tenor of Srbijanka's civic engagement. The material and cultural wealth of the Turajlići comes into stark relief in relation to Nada Lazarević—the surviving tenant of the other side—who we come to know only briefly through a census-worker's interview with Nada, which is filmed by Mila. She lives in impoverished conditions, owns no property, and holds on to her apartment only because of her status as a “protected tenant” in the building. Upon her death a few months later, there is some uneasiness about, but no resistance to, Srbijanka's application to denationalize Nada's apartment, that is for its return to Mila and Nina's inheritance. While this is a reflexive film, and offers ample opportunities for alert viewers (and instructors) to take up questions of class, Turajlić does not ultimately reckon with her own privilege fully and critically, though this privilege seems to be a central focus of the film and a precondition for its making. Instead, the civic culture and responsibility of the urban cultural elite are taken as the political ideal, as the culture from which another (better) Serbia has been articulated against the populism, nationalism, and ignorance of the masses. What falls away, as is so often the case for liberals, is an awareness of the material conditions that make possible their own political outlook or any sustained reflection on the deep and growing inequalities of Serbia—the very kinds of inequalities that once led to the nationalization of this beautiful apartment.
