By any standards, Sofija Sonja Vujanović led a remarkable life. Sonja was a Marxist partisan fighter in Yugoslavia during WW2. She was captured and tortured by the Nazis and ended up as a political prisoner in Auschwitz. Somehow, she survived.
Serbian director Marta Popivoda met Sonja around 14 years ago.
“Ana (Vujanović) is my partner and Sonja’s great-niece, but she is also a co-writer of the film. We conducted the interviews with Sonja together,” the director recalls of her first encounters with the woman who inspired Landscapes Of Resistance, which is selected for Sarajevo’s Documentary Competition and which world-premiered at IFFR in Tiger Competition. “I was fascinated already by her story but when I met her, I met this very gentle, educated old lady with a lot of dignity in herself.”
Popivoda was immediately struck by Sonja’s defiance. Unlike many other elderly people in Serbia, she refused to be patronised. As the director notes, the country doesn’t have a good record in treating its elderly citizens. Impoverished and neglected, “many don’t feel they have agency in the society.”
Sonja was then already 86 years old. Nonetheless, she retained the same strong political beliefs that she had held as a young partisan. Her Marxism also gave her the tools to analyse the society around her. As a “feminist, queer, and anti-fascist artist” herself, Popivoda couldn’t help but be inspired by the older woman.
“When you listen to her, it’s like reading a film script,” the director says of her subject’s uncanny abilities as a storyteller. Sonja’s memory was prodigious. She had sharp insights about everything, from how she was treated as a woman during the war to how the resistance organised itself both during the Partisan struggles and in Auschwitz.
“I cannot ever compare my experience with her experience,” the director notes, but adds that Sonja used vocabulary (phrases like ‘solidarity, comradeship, self-organisation’) that would be instantly recognisable to any leftist activist in Belgrade or Berlin today.
When she first met Sonja, Popivoda was still a junior student at the film school in Belgrade. She knew instantly, though, that she wanted to record the older woman’s reminiscences. She had been collecting Sonja’s stories for several years before deciding to use them as the basis of a documentary. “In the last few years, I just realised now is the moment to make this film because we have a striking similarity with Europe today and the Europe that Sonja lived in during the 1930s.”
Popivoda was filming Sonja in the latter part of her life. Her subject, who was 97 when she died, was keen to leave her reminiscences on record.
In Landscapes Of Resistance, Popivoda uses imagery of the places that Sonja passed through at the most dramatic moments of her life, during the war years, to accompany Sonja’s words on the soundtrack. In her use of landscape, the director was attempting to provide a cinematic equivalent to the Cubist painting of leftist artists in the 30s. There are also on-camera interviews with Sonja and shots showing her going about her daily life in her apartment in Belgrade.
On a more prosaic level, her subject’s cat features prominently. “The cat was definitely very important because the cat in the film shows the passage of time. When we started to make this film, the cat was a baby. Later, at the end of the film, we see this big, grown cat which is also very frightened because her owner is not there anymore.”
Popivoda and Vujanović have been living in Berlin since 2011. Belgrade by then, she says, had become “unbearable” thanks to the rise of neo-Fascism and the homophobia they encountered in their day to day life.
The director’s previous film, Yugoslavia, How Ideology Moved Our Collective Body (2013), premiered at the Berlinale.
A constant theme in Popivoda’s work, and one of the main subjects in the new documentary, is the possibility of resistance. Even within Auschwitz itself, Sonja had been organising against her captors and refusing to accept a role as a passive victim. “One of the main feelings I want to evoke in audiences is that resistance is always possible. Somehow, I think this is very important for all of us today,” the director declares.
