Karpo Aćimović-Godina
Druga linija aka The Other Line is a product of many years of research of neo-avant-garde cultural and art scene in Novi Sad, Serbia (late 60s and 70s), which has been marginalized until today. This artistic movement was directly connected not only with important art centers of the former Yugoslavia, but also with existing flows of world art during its brief and productive activities (7e Biennale de Paris, 19th Berlinale). The cultural and artistic emancipation of that time had implied individual freedom of expression and strong reaction to established boundaries. This avant-garde movement had become threat to communist establishment, the authors' work were sabotaged, the films were sealed off, five artists were taken to trial, two were sent in prison. How is it that the retrograde mechanism of shutting down and removing the most creative and representative progressive impulses of our surrounding is still so current to this day?
Through the conversation with Yugoslav film authors and excerpts from their films, this documentary film tells a story of a film phenomenon and censorship, and its focus is, in fact, a painful epoch of Yugoslav film called “a Black Wave”, which was the most important and artistically strongest period of Yugoslav film industry, created in the sixties and buried in the early seventies by means of ideological and political decisions. The film tells a great “thriller” story of the ideological madness which characterised the totalitarian psychology having left multiple consequences felt up to our very days. It stresses similarities between totalitarian regimes defending their taboos on the example of the persecution of the most important Yugoslav film authors. Those film authors have, however, made world careers and inspired many later authors. The film is the beginning of a debt pay-off to the most significant Yugoslav film authors.
The mysterious, charming Mr. P. F., the protagonist of this full-length documentary film, is a sportsman, inventor, owner of more than 400 patents and a cosmopolitan who knew life in Europe's most glamorous cities. His inquisitiveness and the spirit of cosmopolitanism lured him to Switzerland, where he only just started living. Very quickly he ended up among the European rich elite and they accepted him as one of them. He was a millionaire who was thought to be a billionaire and who also lived like a billionaire.
A sentimental, delightful journey along the former railway route “Porečanka” that connected Trieste and Poreč from 1902 until 1935. Then it was dismantled and the tracks to be used in Mussolini’s war in Abyssinia but they sank in the Mediterranean – an ironic turn of history, an ideal subject for Karpo Godina, the master of tender wit.
Los Angeles in 1935. Fritz Lang receives in his hotel apartment the young film amateur Willy, who wants to prepare an interview with him. At a certain moment Lang starts relating how, as an army officer in the First World War, he spent some time in the house of the lawyer Karol Gatnik in a small town in the northeast of Slovenia. Lang makes friends with Gatnik and gets aquainted with all members of his family. When Lang finds out that Gatnik is a passionate film amateur and that he also possesses his own camera, they make a film together. This is probably Lang’s first contact with cinematography. Late at night Lang looks at the photographs in Los Angeles and revives in his spirit the imaginary meeting with his friend Gatnik.
A ranger whose passion is nude painting comes to work in a remote Bosnian village. He asks the local women to pose naked for him. They are shy at first, but they eventually agree to do so. This makes their husbands furious, who think that the ranger is sleeping with their wives.
The story of a snowman that talks to the boy who built him and helps his family when a fishing drought threatens their livelihood...
Comedy about a group of musicians who are sent to play to villagers and workers to raise morale during a 5 year plan. The trouble is they prefer to play jazz and boogie music to the traditional folk songs, and each time they try their jazz they are reprimanded by the local party secretary.
Story about a group of eccentric Dadaist artists in a small Serbian town in the 1920s.
Set in Dubrovnik, this drama chronicles a friendship between three men, that began just before World War II. One of the men is of Italian origin, another is the wealthy heir of a shipping fortune, and the third is the son of a Jewish antique-store owner. Before the war, they are fast friends, enjoying one another's company at carnivals and at a private fencing club. However, when the war comes, the Italians and Germans move in to create the Independent State of Croatia. The Italian friend becomes a fascist and courts and marries the sister of his rich friend. Soon enough, atrocities are being committed, and anyone suspected of Jewish or Serbian parentage or anti-fascist leanings, is killed.
Godina drove to the north of Serbia, Yugoslavia's Vojvodina province, and shot several folk singers and their families, introducing a wealth of Yugoslav folk music.
Split shipyard worker's Mate, lives with his elderly mother and wife Mara, and trying to prove himself as a boxer. At the same time, his younger brother Luka drunk sex and fantasize about trip in Germany, embarks on a passionate love relationship with a young girl Orom, which was a bit sexually satisfied only him, his step father who thought he was father. The tense atmosphere seasoned with sea waves,can only bring tragedy.
Karpo Acimovic-Godina's short documentary that follows the production of single room omnibus film I Miss Sonia Henie. Features footage of Godina, Dušan Makavejev, Tinto Brass, Bogdan Tirnanić, Mladomir “Puriša” Ðorđević, Paul Morrissey, and Frederick Wiseman.
Godina was ordered to make a short film glorifying the army, but instead made a film about making love, not war. The censors hacked it up, but he managed to save one complete copy.
A coal miner works harder than everything else to make his country proud.
Not far from Saramazalino, there are thousands of girls and soldiers living separately.ser
Documentary focusing on the making of "I Miss Sonia Henie"
One camera in one setting, one attic and eight young directors – the result is a unique Dadaistic collage of seven short sketches. The original task for each filmmaker was to keep each short under three minutes, to set it in one hotel room, and to include the sentence “I miss Sonja Henie." This experimental film was shot over a single night at the international film festival FEST in Beograd in 1971.
"Zdravi ljudi za razonodu"("Healthy People For Fun" or "The Litany of the Healthy People") by Karpo Godina, Yugoslavia 1971, portrays the peoples living in the multicultural Yugoslavian province Vojvodina (today part of Serbia). "Nations and ethnic groups in the province of Vojvodina live in harmonious coexistence. However, members of the same ethnic groups paint facades of their houses the same color -- Croats red, Hungarians green, and Slovaks blue... The film delighted audiences at the premiere and won an award at the Belgrade Documentary and Short Film Festival, but it was soon banned because of alleged subversive elements.
Director invites six homeless men to his flat for a few days (surprising his wife). He asks officials and people on the street if someone can help them, this being SFRJ, a state officially without those left on their own.
Plotless and wordless, beautifully edited shots of young (often naked or semi-naked) people in various positions, illustrating different emotions, actions and situations, underlined by rock music.
Inspired by Karl Marx's "Das Kapital", three men and a girl named Jugoslava decide to wake up the conscience within the working class and peasants. Faced with the primitivism and a lack of morale, their revolution fails and the girl is one to be sacrificed as a witness of their unsuccessful attempt.
After film school, Godina’s first professional work as a director was “Picnic on Sunday,” a 1968 black-and-white short without any words that shows how seven different people spend a Sunday. A simple concept, but in Godina’s hands the short is suffused with both sexuality and revolution. - Paste
On the trail of the partisan to the liberator from the first days of the liberation of Yugoslavia to the meeting with the generation of '68.
The response of the director Karpo Godina and poet Boris A. Novak to the manipulations of the government and the party machinery that bicycles were a means of Nazi and fascist propaganda.
