UnionDocs is delighted to join hands with Dokufest Kosovo to kick off ARTISTIC DIFFERENCES, a UnionDocs Break 🌀ut, co-curated with programmer Cíntia Gil, that hopes to make room for bravely sharing and responding to challenging documentary art, invites a diverse audience into a monthly series of film programs and study groups, and brings those voices to the stage of a public dialogue.

We’re thrilled to come together for a Study Group Session, a kind of grassroots book club, but for documentary art! We’ll stream cutting edge, powerful and poetic features and shorts, pulling out trenchant examples from deep in the archive or resonant works from recent years. It’s all about sparking discussion and deeper investigation, through reading, listening and responding in small, self-organized groups that together form a larger collective experience.

Be sure to tune into the FILM PROGRAM around which this Study Group is structured!

FILM PROGRAM

Shot in the Kosovar village of Nevokaze, 117 depicts the traditional lifestyle of an Albanian family numbering 117 members, all living under one roof and in great harmony. One of the finest examples of ethnographic films to come from this region, it has been called a ‘spiritual portrait of the nation’.

One of the most remarkable cinematic rediscoveries of recent years, this long-unseen documentary—stunningly restored from the original 16 mm materials—is the only film to date by Portuguese director Manuela Serra. With an extraordinary feeling for gesture, the passage of time, and the profundity of silence, Serra captures the everyday routines of three families living in Lanheses, a small village in the north of Portugal. Their rituals of work, leisure, and worship offer a glimpse of a fast-disappearing past, while the presence of one young woman, Isabel, seems to point the way toward the future.

BIOS

Manuela Serra is an actress and director, known for O Movimento das Coisas (1985), Vien di notte (2018) and Necrofilia (1985). She studied cinema at the Institut des Arts et Diffusion (IAD), in Brussels, Belgium, from 1971 to 1974. She worked as assistant editor (archive material, events from 1974-75) for the film Deus, Pátria, Autoridade. She was a founding member of the Cinema Cooperative Virver, until she left in 1981. By that time, she’d worked as a producer and assistant director for several medium-length films and for Rui Simões’s film, Bom Povo Português. Between 1979 and 1985, she produced, directed, and wrote the screenplay for her first work, O Movimento das Coisas.

Boris Buden is a writer, cultural critic, and translator. He studied philosophy in Zagreb and received his PhD in Cultural Theory from Humboldt University, Berlin. In the 1990s he was editor of the magazine and publishing house Arkzin in Zagreb. He is a board member of European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies (eipcp), Vienna. His essays and articles cover topics related to philosophy, politics, translation, linguistics, the post-communist condition, and cultural and art criticism. Among his translations into Croatian are some of the most important works by Sigmund Freud. Buden’s writings appear in numerous books, including the BAK publication Concerning War: A Critical Reader in Contemporary Art (2006/2010) and Art and Contemporary Critical Practice: Reinventing Institutional Critique (2009). He is currently Visiting Professor at the Faculty of Art and Design, Bauhaus University, Weimar. Buden lives and works in Berlin.