The Museum of Modern Art presents the first major North American survey of the films of Goran Paskaljevic, one of Europe’s most respected and critically acclaimed directors. The exhibition Goran Paskaljevic comprises new 35mm English-subtitled prints of 13 features and two shorts by the director, presented January 9–31, 2008, in The Roy and Niuta Titus Theaters.
The director will be in attendance on January 9 at 7:00 p.m. to introduce his debut feature Cuvar Plaze U Zimskom Peridou (Beach Guard in Winter, 1976). The exhibition is organized by Laurence Kardish, Senior Curator, Department of Film.
Paskaljevic (Serbian, b. 1947) spent much of his adolescence at the Belgrade Cinematheque, which his stepfather founded. At the age of 20 he studied cinema at FAMU (Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts), the celebrated film academy in Prague, during the brief, heady period of liberalization in Czechoslovakia, but in 1973, during the early years of the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia, Paskaljevic returned to Yugoslavia, where he commenced making short films and documentaries for television.
His first feature, Beach Guard in Winter, garnered international critical acclaim, and by the time he had completed The Powder Keg (a.k.a. Cabaret Balkan) 22 years and nine feature films later, he was one of Eastern Europe’s leading filmmakers. As an outspoken opponent of President Slobodan Milosevic, he felt his life would be in danger if he remained in Serbia; the rise of nationalism in Yugoslavia prompted him to leave his country in 1992. With his French wife, Christine, he settled in Paris in 1994, although he continued to make fairly long visits to Belgrade, where his two sons live. As a filmmaker in exile, Paskaljevic made How Harry Became a Tree (2001) in Ireland, starring Colm Meaney and Cillian Murphy, a dark fable based on a Japanese short story.
His two most recent features deal with the aftermath of the military conflict in the region: Midwinter’s Night Dream (2004) deals with a Serbian soldier who returns to his apartment after incarceration for desertion, only to find it occupied by a woman and her daughter. The Optimists (2006) is a five-episode dark comedy inspired by life in post-Milosevic Serbia.
Though Paskaljevic’s films are narrative-based, they are driven by restless, idiosyncratic, and all-too-human characters, and often veer off in surprising directions. Paskaljevic finds the extraordinary in the reality of the everyday, and his realism, informed by the political transformations he has witnessed, is inflected with irony. He has written, “The beauty of film for me is its closeness to life. And if it is going to reflect life faithfully, it has to draw on metaphor, just like poetry.”
This exhibition is made possible with the cooperation of the Serbian Ministry of Culture (Belgrade), the City of Belgrade, the Yugoslav Cinematheque (Belgrade), and Hungarian Film Laboratories (Budapest). The Department of Film also acknowledges the help of Madeleine and Philip Zepter, and Christine Gentet-Paskalejvic. -- www.moma.org
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