Srdjan Keča (Serbia)
Director and visual artist. After studying physics at the University of Belgrade, he moved on to learn about documentary filmmaking at the Paris-based Ateliers Varan. In 2011 he received his M.A. from the UK National Film and Television School (NFTS). He has been living in Serbia again since 2012. His projects include Mirage, an experimental documentary exploring the marks of displacement and longing in the city of Dubai; A Letter to Dad, an essay-film about family, war and forgetting; and Museum of the Revolution, a multi-channel video installation about one of the most important buildings of socialist Yugoslavia, which was never built.
His films have been consistently screening in leading documentary festivals: IDFA, DOK Leipzig, Full Frame, Jihlava etc. His NFTS graduation film Mirage won the Best Central and Eastern European Documentary award at the 2012 Jihlava IDFF and the Cottbus Discovery Award at the 2011 Cottbus Film Festival, among others. His first year NFTS film A Letter to Dad premiered in competition at IDFA and won the Best Balkan Documentary award at Dokufest 2011. The two films screened in more than 100 festivals worldwide and gathered much critical acclaim. More recently, his 3-channel video installation Museum of the Revolution opened at the 2014 Venice Biennale of Architecture.
Lives in Serbia.
Museum of the Revolution (2014): In 1961 a daring design by artist and architect Vjenceslav Richter was chosen for what was meant to be one of the most prominent buildings of socialist Yugoslavia: the Museum of the Revolution in New Belgrade. Richter's project exposé started with these words:
"The purpose and idea of this museum is to safeguard the truth about us. From this follows its extraordinary importance, which has found its confirmation in the assigned location.
Thus, it is impossible to approach solving this problem with an arsenal of conventional notions about museums, no matter how valid the solutions that follow from them may be.
The embodiment of the Museum of the Revolution has to express a pervasive and great idea.
Our idea and the idea of us.
It is as much ours, as it is new and authentic.
New ideas arise from fundamental truths and build upon them."
These six short paragraphs read like a poem, and immediately quicken the heart if one knows the fate of the Museum and its building. For someone born and raised in Yugoslavia, it makes a bit too much sense that such a project never achieved anything near its full expression. The facts suggest that over decades changes of site, financing and legislature led to delays and the eventual abandonment of the ambitious project. How it feels, on the other hand, is much like in Bruno Schulz's Street of Crocodiles: intensity dissipates, possibilities fade, "the crazy grey poppies of excitement scatter into ashes".
And yet a hidden life persists among these ashes. The large underground level built in 1978-9 remains, now a labyrinthine home shared by the homeless, people rejected by their families, war veterans, Roma, often all of the above. It is hidden somewhere in between government buildings and the largest shopping center in the Balkans.