Ivan Marković

An unexpected promotion at a cutthroat hedge fund pushes a young couple's relationship to the brink, threatening to unravel not only their recent engagement but their lives.

It’s summer and the streets are almost empty in a small town, once the centre of the metalworking industry in former Yugoslavia. People gather at the public swimming pool. Two friends are saying goodbye.

The first attempts to map the Mississippi Delta date back to the early 18th century. An uncontrollable, fragile and shifting environment in itself, it has since been constantly transformed by the exploitation of its resources. Navigating between times and spaces, the real and the speculative, Sweat gradually immerses us between the lines of the maps, in the fluctuating and insubordinate part of this territory, by following the living beings that inhabit it.

In 19th-century Montenegro, the free mountain territories are surrounded by Turkish forces, isolated from the West and steeped in conservatism, patriarchy, and superstition. Morlak, a poet and bishop inspired by the historical figure Petar II Petrović Njegoš, leads his tribe in resisting the invaders. Gravely ill, he is sent to southern Italy in search of a cure. The journey takes him to a house in Naples, a city that contrasts sharply with his homeland’s isolated hills. As Morlak contemplates his existence, his loyal servant Djuko struggles with profound nostalgia, driven by the fear of his master’s death in a foreign land.

Abandoned at birth in the Greek mountains on a stormy night, Jon is taken in and adopted, without having known his father or mother. As a young man, he meets Iro, a warden in the prison where he is incarcerated after a deadly tragic accident. She seems to seek out his presence, takes care of him, records music for him. Jon’s eyesight begins to fail... From then on, for every loss he suffers, he will gain something in return. Thus, in spite of going blind, he will live his life more fully than ever.

After a 13-year-old student disappears without a trace for a week and suddenly reappears, his mother and teachers are confronted with existential questions that change their whole view of life.

Branko dwells on the fringes of Belgrade society. Isolated and unable to sleep, he speaks to no-one. His only obsession seems to be his younger brother, whose muddy shoes, bloodstained sheets, and murky whereabouts unsettle him. As paranoia sets in, Branko realises his brother isn't the strange one. He is.

Sleepless from the heat, Sokun leaves his crowded construction dormitory and joins a community of fellow workers living in one of many unfinished high-rises. One such tower becomes the long-awaited luxury home for its first tenant, Seda, who soon feels trapped in the vast gated complex.

Andrej lives in a small industrial coastal town. The only escape from his bleak everyday reality is his affection for his friend Ana, which he is unable to express. His situation suddenly changes as various events lead him to a misfortune final encounter with her. The movie is set in the nineties, and through Andrejs story, it pays homage to a lost generation of children and youth growing up during the violent breakup of Yugoslavia.

Rio, an introverted young man, tries to make a living for himself by commiting petty theft in restaurants and resorts around the Croatian coast. His life, however, drastically changes when Andrea, a young Serbian part-time worker, enters his life, with the two becoming partners in crime, planning a major heist of two wealthy women staying at the hotel Andrea works at.

Sava Centar is a congress space built in 1978 in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, whose architecture reflects an idea of the future. Made to host thousands, it now stands almost abandoned. The maintenance workers shoulder the duty of restoring the space.

Landscapes of Resistance traces a journey through the memories of antifascist fighter Sonja (97), the first Partisan woman in Serbia, who was also one of the leaders of the Resistance movement at Auschwitz. We make her story travel through time towards the bodies of the new generation of antifascists, bespeaking that it is always possible to think and practice resistance.

74-year-old dancer Sonja Vukićević moves through socialist-modernist spaces, her body echoing Yugoslavia's last mass performance.

It’s like almost all is lost. Yet still they are here – abandoned bungalows, an artificial lake, dirty plastic bottles, lost donkeys and stray dogs, draining pipes running over fields of salt, deserted factories, statues of revolutionaries, concrete playgrounds covered with weeds, rotten fruit, folded T-shirts, pop songs, decades of forgetting, a single room with a blue tent inside. And it felt like a kiss.

It is a hot summer in the Chinese south - Luo is HIV positive and lonely. Until he finds a companion at a family dinner, a distant cousin.

Marko spends time in the abandoned apartment of his childhood in Belgrade. Traces of the past are being drawn and memories, both idyllic and traumatic, are combined. The family VHS archive shows his universe during 1998 and 1999: gatherings, pets, videogames, and moments of uncertainty reveal a common life embraced by an historical event.

Heidi heads to the Heidelberg Christmas market to sell her hand-painted ornaments. While there, she falls for a local artisan who helps her reconnect with her lost heritage.

Branka is a young caretaker who has recently moved to an island to look after an elderly woman. After the harsh winter is over and her job is finished, Branka decides to stay on the island for the summer season. She gets a job in tourism, but the pay is meager and the job exhausting, making it just a temporary solution.

After leaving the ship on which she works, Sanja finds herself stranded, with nowhere to go but home. The shipyard has filed for bankruptcy, leaving many workers out of work. A storm comes; one life is lost. Luka is waiting for the night in the woods. The night when everything could change.

Body in Plural moves between bodies and buildings to trace how a single historic event continues to reverberate through time. From a 1988 mass performance in Yugoslavia to today's protests in Serbia, the film questions how freedom can still be imagined, not as possession, but as relation.

Once a symbol of Yugoslavia's progress, Sava Centar was left to deteriorate since the country broke apart. Piece by piece, the interior elements that resided in this cultural and congress centre since the 70's are torn out. Like many of the younger workers on the reconstruction, Nenad is here for the first time.

One sleeps by day, the other by night, as the city around them expands in all directions.

What does it mean to inhabit or occupy a landscape or a frame? To conjure up time? These are deceptively simple questions that the artist Isabell Heimerdinger gives us an opportunity to ponder in her film SOON IT WILL BE DARK. The context is a stretch of coast, a tropical place where, dotted in the background, a few old, dilapidated colonial buildings survive. A patch of countryside, half-village, half-forest, bordering the sea, and where our gaze falls on a man as the days go by, while he busies himself with his task – from one spot to another, conscientiously clearing the land around the buildings with a machete in the luxuriant undergrowth of a dense forest of majestic trees. Measured, considered, precise and respectful movements…