Through an intimate reconstruction of an important phone call, When The Phone Rang investigates dislocation and the nature of remembering. In the protagonist’s eleven year old mind the phone call erases her entire country, history and identity.
Original Title Kada je zazvonio telefon Year of production 2024 Length 73' CountrySerbia/USA Shooting Format 2K Aspect Ratio 1,66:1 Dialogue Serbian/English Director Iva Radivojević Production Set Sail Films,Ivaasks Films in association withPicture Palace Pictures ProducersAndrijana Sofranis Sucur, Marija Stojnić, Madeleine Molyneaux, Iva Radivojević Writer Iva Radivojević Cinematographer Martin DiCicco Editor Iva Radivojević Music Iva Radivojević Sound Design & Mix Leandros Ntounis (I Heard Voices - Athens, Greece) Camera Assistant and Loader Bojan Durisić Gaffer Viktor Minić 16mm Film Lab Processing NFI Sound Recordist Bojan Palikuća Color Dimitris Karteris - Athens, Greece Mastering / DCP Chris Karteris - Athens, Greece Cast Natalija Ilinčić, Srna Vasić, Vasilije Zečević, Danica Maksimović, Anton Augustinov, Mila Drobnjak, Dunja Vladisavljević, Ivana Pančić, Ibro Sakić, Slavica Bajčeta With support from Film Center Serbia, Ministry of Culture of Serbia, Princess Grace Foundation, Chicken and Egg Pictures, Hungarian Film Incentive
Director's Statement Writer Dubravka Ugresic notes that memories appear as if from a dream, returning to haunt the present. This phone call is one such memory, and it brings with it a slew of others - discombobulated and out of order. The aim of this film is to give these memories a container, all the while inviting witnesses. The call came long distance. In those days, one could tell from the quality of the line. I was home alone and so the news had to be delivered to me, and quickly, before the line got cut off. My grandfather Zeljko in Zagreb had died, and I was to tell my mother about her father’s death. This phone call brought alarm, anxiety and a marking of some kind of an end. Receiving it was the last memory of that time I can recall in detail. In that adolescent mind, it was this incident that caused the dislocation, that brought death, and consequently caused the death of the country, our identity, disintegration of the family, community, language . The entire film is constructed of specific memories that have stayed with me from that period just before leaving Yugoslavia. The repetition of the phone call is a structural device, mimicking the repetitive nature of remembering, fragmented like memory is fragmented. Looped. Distorted. Everything in the film is based on real events, memories, and people. Although the events happened at different time intervals - perhaps two days apart, three weeks or five months apart - in memory they are all squeezed in and around the event of the phone call. The memories circle around loss and displacement - as experienced by an eleven year old girl. This moment of departure consequently becomes the source of all my work, the setting of what’s to come. With the film I’m interested in recreating and revisiting the days before the departure, which signal a kind of tearing, a kind of death. The film is fragmented in the same way that memory is fragmented. In fact, a migrant’s existence is inherently fragmented as they move from country to country, language to language, reality to reality. The film investigates not only personal memory but also collective memory of a particular moment in place and time. If we consider one of the aims of war to be the destruction of memory, eradicating culture’s memory and collective existence then these private, unwritten accounts act as counter-memory, surviving despite the attempts of erasure and preserving narratives outside of national and nationalistic (authoritative) agendas.
