FLOTACIJA
FLOTATION
Eluned Zoë Aiano , Alesandra Tatić / Serbia / 2023 / 77 min / Colour
Italian premiere
In Majdanpek, a city in eastern Serbia with a dual identity divided between magic and industry, the fate of a family is intrinsically linked to both. Desa is the widow of the union leader who carries on his legacy by ensuring the rights of the miners' families. Dragan, her brother, has been a miner since he was 15 and, successor to his father Pera, is the last of a lineage of hunters who fight to keep alive the tradition of dragons, which are gradually disappearing. The most frightening creature now is the mine, now privatised by Chinese investors, where flotation (flotacija), that odorous mineral processing process, becomes a dark symbol of the human condition of Majadanpek and a harbinger of environmental devastation. The documentary shows the lives of the inhabitants in a slice-of-life format where tradition and modernity do not collide, but simply coexist.
Eluned Zoë Aiano
Aiano's short film All Her Dying Lovers (2020) was presented at the Hot Docs Documentary Film Festival in Toronto. Selected for the Wapping Project artistic residency in Berlin and for Meduse in Quebec, she was also a student of Berlinale Talents and IDFA Project Space. She writes about cinema and collaborates with the East European Film Bulletin.
Alesandra Tatić
She is a Serbian visual anthropologist and lives between France and Spain. She collaborates with the women's labor movement. As the founder of the Wild Pear Arts collective, she co-authored short documentary films. She is a PhD candidate in anthropology at the Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) in Paris.
Credits
Cinematography Eluned Zoë Aiano, Milica Drakulić, Vincent LaurinSound Bojan PalikućaEditing Eluned Zoë Aiano, Marija KovačinaMain cast Dragan Marković, Desanka Buzejić Production company Greta Rauleac, Miloš Ljubomirović
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