Silence of Reason
Director: Kumjana Novakova
North Macedonia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, 63 minutes, 2023, documentary
Forensic video essay constructed as a performative research into the first international criminal tribunal case to enter convictions for war-time rape as a form of torture and sexual enslavement as a crime against humanity.
While working solely with archive and testimonies, Silence of Reason acts as a memory itself: elusive and fluid, it rejects framing, moving in all directions, spatial and temporal. The singular experiences of violence and torture by women from the Foča rape camps during the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina become our collective memories, surpassing time and space.
Trigger warning: detailed descriptions of sexualized, physical and psychological violence
Film screening dates: 23.11.2024 — 8.12.2024
Director
Kumjana Novakova is a research-based filmmaker working also as a film curator and lecturer. Originally born in Yugoslavia, Kumjana has worked in the field of film and arts since 2006. Her formal education combines international relations, cultural and social research studies in Sofia, Sarajevo, Bologna and Amsterdam.
In 2006 she co-founded the Pravo Ljudski Film Festival in Sarajevo, and acts as its chief curator. She was leading the Film Department of the Museum of Contemporary Arts in Skopje from 2018 to 2021.
As an author, Kumjana explores the languages of cinema researching relationships related to power, war, memories and (un)belonging. She is interested in developing strategies of creating meaning from the position of filmmaking, and its potentialities as a territory of new collectivities. Her work has been shown and exhibited across the world.
Her film Disturbed Earth (co-directed with G.C. Candi) has been shortlisted for the Academy Awards. Her last film Silence of Reason won the Heart of Sarajevo for Human Rights in Documentary Film and the Best Directing Award in the Envision competition at the 2023 IDFA Festival.
Kumjana currently lives between Sarajevo and Skopje, North Macedonia.
In 2006 she co-founded the Pravo Ljudski Film Festival in Sarajevo, and acts as its chief curator. She was leading the Film Department of the Museum of Contemporary Arts in Skopje from 2018 to 2021.
As an author, Kumjana explores the languages of cinema researching relationships related to power, war, memories and (un)belonging. She is interested in developing strategies of creating meaning from the position of filmmaking, and its potentialities as a territory of new collectivities. Her work has been shown and exhibited across the world.
Her film Disturbed Earth (co-directed with G.C. Candi) has been shortlisted for the Academy Awards. Her last film Silence of Reason won the Heart of Sarajevo for Human Rights in Documentary Film and the Best Directing Award in the Envision competition at the 2023 IDFA Festival.
Kumjana currently lives between Sarajevo and Skopje, North Macedonia.