Film: Legacy (Zavestanje), Ivan Jović, Serbia, 2016, digital, 91 minutes, Serbian with English subtitles.
Watch the film: Legacy can be viewed anytime between 19 and 26 March via the Essay Film Festival online screening room: https://essayfilmfestival-screeningroom.com/
Live event: 26 March 2022, 19:00-20:30, please join us for a live discussion with film director Ivan Jović and project director Monja Jović in conversation with Mina Radović (Essay Film Festival): {ADD LINK HERE}
Legacy is a cinematic memorial to the Serbian victims of genocide in the Independent State of Croatia (1941-1945). Edited from 450 hours of recorded interviews, it is the fruit of a larger oral history project, Project Legacy, intended to preserve the culture of remembrance of the Serbian people. Comparable to Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (1985), the film presents the personal testimonies of 55 survivors, reconstructing the historical course of the described events. Told through black-and-white tableaux of faces, contrasting expression with exposition, the film provides a voice to those who never had the opportunity to tell their story and connects contemporary audiences to the survivors’ experience of living through such unimaginable horrors. At once a work of meticulous precision and a work of poetry, Legacy is a unique documentary account of the Serbian experience of genocide.