The Institute of Documentary Film will, for the eleventh time, award the Silver Eye for the best documentary from Central and Eastern Europe during the Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival in the Czech Republic. Among the nominated works, in addition to the films Then Comes the Evening and Ivan Milosavljević’s Blue Border, is the feature-documentary film TELENOVELA EN GRIS Y MULTICOLOR by Filip Martinović.
The synopsis reveals the following: It has been 26 years since Filip’s family emigrated to Barcelona from Serbia. His father died when Filip was 12 and was buried there. Filip tries to find the answer to a simple question: where is he from? Filip will begin his journey by visiting family members to find out about their identity, their reason for leaving the country, and where they will be buried. In Barcelona, Filip meets Asha, a young Ethiopian with similar problems who she falls in love with. Together they will go to a distant land to find answers to their questions, but it turns out they won’t find the right answers. In an attempt to clarify the issue of his identity, Filip will reach for the telenovela, a favorite genre in both countries he lived in, and thus try to better understand his family’s motives and circumstances by reconstructing the scene of their departure from the country.
At all the festivals where the film has participated in the Work in Progress workshops, the film has have received accolades – at the Locarno Festival, as part of the First Look on Serbian Cinema program, it won the Filmas Advertising Award donated by Le Film Français. In the Work in Progress section Beldocs Festival in Belgrade it was awarded the Mir Media Group Award for post-production sound, as well as the East Silver Caravan Award for distribution, and a year earlier, also at Beldocs, it won the Film Center Serbia Award for the best project in development.