The debut feature film Asymmetry, directed by Maša Nešković has won the Award for Best Feature Film at this year’s digital edition of the World Film Festival in Sydney. The creation of this achievement was supported by the Film Center of Serbia (FCS).
According to the organizers, the entire selection of this year’s edition will be shown during the double edition of the festival planned for the spring of next year. And this year, a selection of 42 films (feature, documentary, experimental, music videos, from Australia and around the world) was shown. The jury did not sit in the traditional sense, but all the films were watched and official decisions were made about the best films – and this Serbian film came out on top.
Asymmetry had its world premiere at the Sao Paulo Film Festival, and the Serbian premier in Belgrade at the Auteur Film Festival in 2019. On that occasion, this film won two important professional awards: Marija Šarac received the “Marko Glušac” Award for the best editing, while Đordje Arambašić received the “Aleksandar Petković Petko” Award for the best cinematography.
The film deals with the question of the transformation of love relationships over time and the reasons why relationships fall apart. One hot Belgrade summer brings love stories of three couples: a boy and a girl, a young man and woman, and finally a husband and wife after 20 years of marriage. As the plot progresses, the stories intertwine and a broader picture of just one love relationship stands out – one couple in three key phases of their lives.
The cast includes: Daria Lorenci Flatz, Uliks Fehmiu, Mira Janjetović, Mladen Sovilj, Lola Vitasović i Mateja Poljčić, Dubravka Kovjanić, Milica Stefanović, Tamara Krcunović, Ljubomir Bandović, Milica Janevski, Momo Pićurić, Goran Slavić…
The screenplay was written by Maša Nešković, Vladimir Arsenijević and Staša Bajac, and the producers are This and That Productions from Serbia, Korektif from Slovenia and Nightswim from Italy, with the support of Film Center Serbia and the Ministry of Culture and Information of the Republic of Serbia. The DOP is Đorđe Arambašić, the editor Marija Šarac, composer Janja Lončar, costume design by Biljana Grgur and set design by Jovana Cvetković and Jelena Sopić.
The director said this about her film: “I made this film inspired by the themes that haunt me, with the idea of questioning the transformation of love relationships over time and the reasons why relationships fall apart. I wanted to create a universe in which different phases of a relationship can exist at the same time, in which you can simultaneously observe a middle-aged couple breaking up, a 25-year-old couple falling in love and a couple of children spending their summer vacation wandering around an empty city. The idea was to observe the oldest couple, at the same time during childhood and youth, to gain new knowledge and a deeper understanding of their relationship, and that by having all three phases of that relationship exist at the same time, younger couples get a chance to do some things differently. So, what you will see is a small film from Serbia that primarily deals with emotions, and all the characters emerged from today’s Belgrade reality. ”
Maša Nešković was born in 1984 in Belgrade. She graduated in film and television directing at the Faculty of Dramatic Arts in 2009. She has directed 11 short feature films and 12 documentaries, many of them screened and awarded at international short and student film festivals.