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KARLOVY VARY 2022 Proxima

Mladen Kovačević • Director of Another Spring

“It's an intimate reminiscence, especially from the perspective of this new pandemic, about events from the early 1970s”

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- We delve into how COVID-19 inspired the documentary director to make a film about the 1972 smallpox epidemic in Yugoslavia

Mladen Kovačević • Director of Another Spring

After the world premiere of Merry Christmas, Yiwu [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Mladen Kovačević
film profile
]
at Rotterdam in 2020, Serbian documentary director Mladen Kovačević was preparing to enter production on his new film, which he’d planned to shoot in eight countries. But then, of course, COVID-19 happened. “It would have been crazy to attempt it with all of the restrictions in place,” he says as we sit on the balcony of his Karlovy Vary hotel, where his new feature, Another Spring [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Mladen Kovačević
film profile
]
, premiered in the Proxima competition.

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Since his first found-footage film, 4 Years in 10 Minutes [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile
]
, Kovačević has been thinking about using archive materials again, and the idea presented itself immediately. As various medical experts started appearing in the media, one of the most prominent was epidemiology professor Zoran Radovanović, who was at the centre of the world's last smallpox outbreak that took place in Yugoslavia in 1972, and who wrote a book about it, entitled Variola Vera.

“I had this feeling that my life had suddenly changed, and it inspired me very quickly. Almost the very same day, I thought about variola vera and the 1972 epidemic,” he recalls. So producer Iva Plemić Divjak went to a bookshop and got the book, and they started working on the film. Even though it's a work by a medical professional and doesn't have a real narrative structure, the chronology and chain of events were there.

“As soon as you start reading, you realise that the structure is there. This is what's most interesting for me, when I find these organic structures that don't have to be forced,” Kovačević says. The first part of the story, telling of how smallpox arrived in Yugoslavia from the Baghdad bazaar, resembles a police procedural. “And from the moment the narrator and protagonist, Dr Radovanović, gets involved, it turns into something like a thriller because they are actively fighting this disease,” the director explains.

Using the archive material

Radio Television Serbia (RTS), which inherited the archive of the former TV Belgrade from Yugoslav times, had the footage from the period, but none of it was digitised. So when the production team informed them that they were making a film, they scanned it in 2K, which made RTS a co-producer on the documentary. Other sources included Kosovo's TV Priština, the Army's Zastava Film and Yugoslav Newsreels. This diversity meant there were discrepancies in how the various pieces of footage looked. “Other than slowing down the footage during more or less the entire film, we did not try to visually unify the material,” Kovačević explains.

Slowing it down to up to 30% of the original speed, the team practically reinterpreted the footage from the point of view of 50 years later. “The idea was that this would help the archives resemble memories, as if they were slowly forming. It also set this thriller-like, menacing tone of a dangerous disease spreading unnoticed around the country.”

Sound design and music

When you have a film predominantly consisting of slowed-down footage, realistic sound design is out of the question. When Kovačević, editor Jelena Maksimović and sound designer Jakov Munižaba started working on the editing, they used Yugoslav experimental electronic music from the 1960s and 1970s. “But this music is very eclectic and impatient, changing moods too quickly,” the director remembers. “And I don't like cutting other people's works.”

Sometimes, creative decisions come from an inspiration; at others, they are the result of a coincidence. It just so happened that the same week, Munižaba got appointed as the head of Radio Belgrade's electronic studio, which included the legendary, giant Synthi 100 analogue-digital synthesiser custom-made by the UK's Electronic Music Studios in 1971. “Some of the music we used in the editing was actually made on this synth, and I asked Jakov, ‘Why don't you try something similar?’” Kovačević recalls. This droning, heavily atmospheric score became Munižaba's first original film soundtrack, after more than 90 credits as a sound designer.

The reliable narrator

Kovačević wanted Dr Radovanović to be the only narrator in the film, and they spent a week in the studio, ending up with some 20 hours of audio material.

“He is a reliable narrator who has revisited his memories countless times and confronted them with facts, and these memories are complemented by archival interviews,” the director details. “He tells the official version of events, but this is not a polemic or historical film; it's an intimate reminiscence, especially from the perspective of this new pandemic, about events from the early 1970s.”

This quality of reminiscence is strengthened by the fact that the 1972 epidemic was at the beginning of Radovanović's career – one can imagine it being the most important event of his professional life. And in dramaturgical terms, the more a thing means to a character, the more engaging the film is.

“The way he shares these facts, he's not doing it like a professional narrator would. These facts mean something to him. When he says, ‘In the third wave, there were 173 infected people,’ he knew who those people were. I think I'm not reading anything into it, but I do believe you can hear in his voice that it's important to him. And that's why it works,” says Kovačević.

1972 versus 2022

Just as Another Spring would probably not have been made if a new pandemic hadn't started in 2020, it is impossible to watch it independently of this specific point of view. What was the biggest takeaway for Kovačević in terms of comparing the two eras?

“It is so obvious that at that time, experts were making decisions and the public listened to those experts, and the authorities listened to them, too,” he says. “All the people you could see on TV were the scientists; it wasn't even an option that a layman would start talking about it in the public domain.”

Even the Yugoslav president Tito didn't make a single public appearance or a statement during the smallpox outbreak. “Even when the experts were making unpopular decisions, no one doubted that they were for the common good. The smallpox vaccine was normally not given to pregnant women, but the data from the World Health Organisation led them to the conclusion that the danger posed by smallpox was much bigger than that of the vaccine. The same went for newborn children. But they decided to inoculate these populations in the regions where the probability of infection was higher, and they were proved right: 67% of newborns who were not vaccinated died of smallpox,” Kovačević explains.

On a wider scale, when the programme of smallpox eradication started in 1967, the proposal came from the USSR, and all members of WHO agreed to it. “It was the Cold War era, but no one said, ‘We're not going to do what Russia says’,” the director points out. “These scientists, regardless of what the political relations were between their countries, managed in ten years to eradicate the most dangerous disease in human history, which had killed more than half a billion people in the 20th century alone.”

Smallpox remains the only infectious disease that has ever been completely eradicated, an outcome that was officially declared in 1980. “There are four or five diseases today that such an approach would work on, including polio,” Kovačević says. “But such a degree of solidarity and co-operation is practically unimaginable in this era.”

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