In this forensic video essay, filmmaker Kumjana Novakova uses mostly written testimonies by the women raped and abused during the Bosnian war to explore the collective memory of the rape camps. In grainy video footage, the camera explores the places where these inhuman crimes took place, while the women speak about the unspeakable. The film is built as a performative research into the first international criminal tribunal case to enter convictions for war rape as a form of torture and for war sexual enslavement as crime against humanity. Silence of Reason acts as a memory itself: elusive, fluid, rejecting framing, moving in all directions, spatial and temporal. The singular experiences of violence and torture become our own collective memories, surpassing time and space.
Republic of North Macedonia, Bosnia and Herzegovina 2023, '63
DIRECTOR: Kumjana Novakova
SCENARIO: Kumjana Novakova
CAMERA: arhivski materijal /archival footage
MONTAGE: Jelena Maksimović
PRODUCERS: Kumjana Novakova
PRODUCTION: Medea
FESTIVALS & AWARDS:
Sarajevo FF: Human Rights Award (2023)
IDFA: Best Directing Award (2023)
Torino FF: Special Mention (2023)
Belgrade Auteur FF: Best film (2023)
Watch Docs FF (2023)
MoMa Documentary Fortnight (2024)
Kumjana Novakova
Originally born in Yugoslavia, Kumjana Novakova has worked in the field of film and arts since 2006.
She is the co-founder of the Pravo Ljudski Film Festival in Sarajevo, and acts as its chief curator and director. She was also leading the Film Department of the Museum of Contemporary Arts in Skopje from 2018 to 2021.
As an author, her research lays between cinema and contemporary video art, often exploring how moving images address identities, memories and the collective self. Her last film Disturbed Earth (co-directed with G.C. Candi) has been shortlisted for the Academy Awards. Her new audio-visual art project The Silence of Reason traces women’s experiences of violence in wartime in former Yugoslavia and has been awarded with an art grant by the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network.
Currently she is an associate professor at Master of Film of the Netherlands Film Academy, while pursuing her PhD in Contemporary Arts and Media in Belgrade.
Kumjana currently lives between Sarajevo and Skopje, North Macedonia
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