IVICA VIDANOVIC, documentary film "I GIVE YOU MY PEACE "

MATURING COSTS

Ivica, until now you have done mainly feature length documentaries, and your film of this year lasts 16 and a half minutes. Did you make a concession to the requirements dictated by this Festival in respect to the length?

This film lasts that much,16 minutes, as such is the form, as well. That film is all made of the atmosphere, a film made in the plain. I come from Belgrade and somehow I have always gravitated towards the regions of Sumadija, Raska, that are wavy and full of hills. Only recently I got acquainted with the plain and to tell the truth I fell in love with it. It has some other kind of peace and a different restlessness than the geography of the southern parts Serbia . It carried me somewhere, to try to make a film in those horizons and strange verticals. This film was made as a part of the accompanying programmes for the conferences in Subotica and Becej last year that were dedicated to tolerance and co-habitation of the people of different religions who live there together, and to how they can join Europe together. I tried to find some similarities that join them and they are that earth and the sky.

How long did it take you to make it?

We were doing this film for quite some time, touring round Vojvodina, Backa, for at least ten days, looking for good locations, looking for the people that could be representatives of that life there. We also managed to make, so to say, the church, both the catholic and the orthodox, to work together this project, but also to “open”, as we say it, for the budget.

Where has the film been screened so far; have the people that you filmed seen it, too?

It was shown on the conference itself, and after that nowhere, until the Festival. What is interesting is that so far i have done only the films dealing with difficult subjects, Kosovo , Bosnia . This is the first film where I found myself on that “co-habitation road”. It is the last Serbian country annexed to the main country, later than both Kosovo and Raska. It is the most different in that cultural sense. The Serbs live with other people significantly different then them and it seems to me that is why they are terribly radical in that they care so much about themselves and keeping their identity, and on the other hand they are very peaceful and love their neighbours, which is difficult to find in any other part of our country. Everything is soft, everything is light, everything is slow, and, in fact, you see that a lot of things are going on there, behind it all.

Ivica, you have left a big television system, where you had that financial security. You have founded your independent company, "Svetlopisno odeljenje". How free are you now to choose the projects, i.e., how much does that financial insecurity forces you to think carefully what your next project is going to be?

You know, when you work on a television, you rarely think about the funds. The producers usually tel you: can be done, can't be done, there is money, there is no money, and then you go and find the rest. When you start an independent production you depend on the people who will give you any money for a documentary production. Then you start to choose something that you like, something that you don't find difficult to bother all your friends with to work, you bother yourself.. I have always believed that it is important that you work a lot, as through every work you harden yourself. When you come to your private production, that system of thinking changes: you think longer, you don't enter shootings, so that the results are somehow more mature. Only now, after ten years of work on documentary films I, for example, catch myself thinking about each take. You know, that is what is very important for the very forming of both the director and of someone who is a producer.

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