This week’s special event program at Doc Alliance is called “The Search for Freedom,” and it’s a selection of five fairly new titles screening at this year’s One World Romania, an annual human-rights focused film festival happening March 21–27. Among those in the program is the world premiere Croatian feature Free, as well as the Romanian boxing doc Golden Robot and a look at Hungarian-Slovak relations titled Felvidek: Caught in Between.
Then there are two films about refugees, Michael Graversen’s Dreaming of Denmark and Želimir Žilnik’s Logbook_Serbistan, the latter of which we’re thrilled to be able to host below in participation with Doc Alliance Films. It’s a partly scripted docudrama, in which real subjects seeking asylum in Serbia participated in fictionalized accounts. Read the full synopsis featured in the One World Romania and Doc Alliance program guides:
The Serbian asylum system has to deal every day with dozens of cases from Syria, Afghanistan, Somalia, Ghana and other remote countries. Difficult travelling conditions, trafficking, human rights abuses — these are only some of the obstacles that asylum seekers face before entering Serbia, on their year-long path to freedom. Želimir Žilnik’s docu-drama, written in collaboration with his protagonists, follows the lives of illegal migrants and asylum-seekers who are housed in refugee centers in Serbia following dramatic flights from war and destitution. They neither speak the languages of the countries they have to cross on their way into the unknown, nor do they know the names of the smugglers they have to rely on. It’s nothing but natural those people have powerful stories to tell. This is how life can be for the people stranded against their will in the Balkans: Žilnik tells it with panache and accompanied by music, in an attempt to build some new credibility for them as individual human beings, beyond the victim label. Will Serbia be just a stopover or could they, perhaps, settle down and start a new life here?
You can stream Logbook_Serbistan right here for free through Sunday, March 20th. And you can watch the other four films during this same window over at the Doc Alliance site. If you miss out on the free period, you should still check out the program via low cost rental, or sign up for s DA Films subscription and see these and more.
http://dafilms.com/film/9809-destinacija_serbistan/embed/w720/
