“This Film is a Call to Solidarity, Self-Organization and Resistance”: Marta Popivoda and Ana Vujanović on their International Film Festival Rotterdam-debuting Landscapes of Resistance

Filmmaker, video artist and “cultural worker” Marta Popivoda has spent much of her career focusing on philosophies and movements through a decidedly feminist lens. Her first feature, 2013’s Yugoslavia, How Ideology Moved Our Collective Body, premiered at the Berlinale and went on to become part of the permanent collection at MoMA. And now with Landscapes of Resistance, which debuted in the Tiger Competition at IFFR 2021, the Berlin-based filmmaker returns to her native Belgrade with her partner, and the film’s co-writer, Ana Vujanović. Together they gently probe and cinematically preserve the memory of Vujanović’s grandmother Sonja, who brings to life an astonishing account of her time as one of the first female partisans in Yugoslavia. A fateful decision that eventually landed her in Auschwitz, where she continued leading the resistance. Just after the film’s virtual run in the Tiger Competition at Rotterdam, Filmmaker reached out to Popivoda and co-writer Vujanović to learn all about WWII’s unknown heroes, being a Serbian in Berlin, and why the world needs more partisans right now.

To read my interview with the duo visit Filmmaker magazine.