The international film festival “New Horizons”, the 22nd in a row, ended in the Polish city of Wroclaw, and a special award went to the co-production of Germany, Spain, South Korea and Serbia – the film Afterwater directed by our director Dane Komljen. The production of that film was supported, among others, by Film Center Serbia and the Ministry of Culture and Information of the Republic of Serbia.
At the festival 209 feature films and 62 short films were shown, and the French-Swiss-Iranian-Lebanese film “See You Friday Robinson” won the main prize.
The world premiere of the film Afterwater was held at the 72nd Berlin Film Festival, as part of the “Forum” selection. This is Komljen’s second feature film. After the worldwide festival success of his first film All Northern Cities and the success of the short films Fantastic Sentences and Our Body, which earned him a nomination for the best short film at the European Film Awards in 2015, Komljen is recognized worldwide as a significant new author of art film. Thanks to his specific cinematic expression, special screenings and retrospectives of his works were organized at the Lincoln Center in New York, as well as at the Institute of Modern Art in London.
The film follows Jonas, who studies insects and fish, and Signe, who studies leaves and grasses. After a day spent in the gardens and libraries, they meet, leave the city by train and set up their tent on the shore of the lake. As they read, eat fruit, wander through the forest and swim in cold water, the world around them seems further and further away. A stranger appears and a trio is formed. But there are other triangles, other lakes, different places, different times. The film consists of three parts, each shot in a different part of the world and with a different recording technique, from 16mm and 8mm filmstrip to modern digital cameras, moving between past, present and future and between documentary, feature and experimental forms.
“The idea was to make a film as fluid as water itself, to begin one story and make it flow, imperceptibly, to the next story, floating on and on until parallels, rhymes and echoes appear. The starting point was stories about sunken settlements and histories, from which we arrived at the study of a certain landscape, a reflective surface onto which stories and images are projected. “Aftermath” explores lakes as ecosystems and collections of the imaginary, using film to record a multitude of life forms, lakes, materials, time and ways of being together,” Komljen said about the new film.
The film stars Jonas Hapka, Signe Westberg and Boban Kaludjer. The main producer is “Flaneur Films”, while Serbian co-producers are Nataša Damnjanović and Vladimir Vidić from the Belgrade production company Dart film.