Fri, Oct 28 / 7pm
Sun, Oct 30 / 7pm
Wed, Nov 2 / 9pm
Dir. Srdjan Keca
2021, Czech Republic, Serbia, Croatia, 91 min
Serbo-Croatian with English subtitles
“The wind got up in the night and took our plans away,” reads the proverb in the opening titles of Museum of the Revolution. The words are a reference to the 1961 plan to build a grand museum in Belgrade as a tribute to Socialist Yugoslavia. It was supposed to “safeguard the truth” about the Yugoslav people. But the plan never got beyond the construction of the basement.
The derelict building now tells a very different story from the one envisioned by the initiators 60 years ago. In the damp, pitch-dark building live the outcasts of a society reshaped by capitalism. The film focuses on a girl who earns a little cash on the street by cleaning car windows with her mother. The girl has a close friendship with an old woman who also lives in the basement. Against the background of a transforming city, the three women find refuge in each other.
Museum of the Revolution is an immersive experience that allows viewers to enter the spaces the women inhabit and witness with intimate immediacy the precariousness with which they live day by day. Making shrewd use of long takes, stillness, and silence, the film is a thoughtful meditation on homelessness and survival. Neither objectifying nor sentimentalizing the stories of Milica, Vera, and Mara, the film is a frank look at life on the margins. If the abandoned Museum of the Revolution was meant to be a sign of progress, the film invites viewers to consider the hopes for a society that stands memorialized as a chasm of forgotten dreams. – Pat Mullen, POV Magazine
