I Have a Song to Sing You

by Eluned Zoe Aiano, Alesandra Tatic

Details

Original TitleImam pesmu da vam pevam
DirectorEluned Zoe Aiano, Alesandra Tatic
Duration05:40 min
CountrySerbia / UK
Year2018

About the directors

Eluned Zoë Aiano is a British filmmaker, video editor and translator with a background in Visual Anthropology whose work is generally centred on Central and Eastern Europe. She won the Tribeca IF/Then short pitch for her film “Black&White”, which is due to premiere in autumn 2019. She also writes about film and is a regular contributor to the East European Film Bulletin.

Alesandra Tatić is a visual anthropologist based in Marseille. Combining academic research and photography have led her to a series of short and one feature documentary projects. Through her fieldwork (mainly ex-Yugoslavia, Hungary, and France) she is generally searching for innovative ways of expressing anthropological findings through digital visuals and giving a voice to women in migration. Alesandra is currently a social science PhD candidate at EHESS.

Synopsis

As a child, Ivanka was chosen by fairy women for the special task of entering the realm of the dead to discover the future. As an old lady, the spirits have left her, so how does she navigate between the two worlds now?

This experimental short documentary seeks out Ivanka, a woman who lives in rural Eastern Serbia and who spent most of her life falling into trance to enter the realm of the dead and learn about the future. Ethnographic archive materials from her days as a prophet are interwoven with contemporary footage shot now that the supernatural forces have left her. As such, the film plays on dualities of time and ontology to explore how this experience has affected her relationship to the landscape that surrounds her, while engaging in a meta discourse on the digital nature of film and visualisation of memory.

The film was funded by the London Short Film Festival as part of their “With Teeth” scheme to support non-conformist independent filmmaking.

Credits

Session I

Session II