Iva Radivojevic
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“We Initially Imagined It as a Rectangle That From the Left Starts Off Dark, Gray and Gloomy”: Editor Iva Radivojevic on King Coal
In Sundance NEXT selection King Coal, Elaine McMillion Sheldon employs a hybrid approach, blending contemporary imagery with archival material and poetic voiceover to explore the impact that coal — the substance and the industry — has had on Central Appalachia. Below, editor Iva Radivojevic, herself a filmmaker, discusses her collaboration with Sheldon on the picture. Filmmaker: How and why did you wind up being the editor of your film? What were the factors and attributes that led to your being hired for this job? Radivojevic: Elaine and I had known each other for about a decade prior to making this […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Feb 1, 2023 -
Six Favorites from the Just Concluded 2021 New Directors/New Films Festival
After moving its 2020 edition to December and shifting to online-only viewing, New Directors/New Films returned to its usual springtime slot for its 50th iteration in 2021, combining virtual screenings with in-person ones at the Museum of Modern Art and Film at Lincoln Center. The fest celebrated its golden anniversary with a streamable selection of films that played at ND/NF in years past — early work by luminaries such as Chantal Akerman, Charles Burnett, Lee Chang-dong, Christopher Nolan, and Humberto Solás. However, this well-deserved victory lap was just a sidebar to the main program: 27 new feature films, along with […]
by Nelson Kim on May 14, 2021 -
“Everything You’re Feeling or Seeing in the Moment Comes Into the Story”: Director Iva Radivojevic on Her Borgesian Tale of Wanderlust and Connection, Aleph
“One September day,” begins the title card at the head of the New Directors/New Films-premiering Aleph, “I met Rodrigo near 23rd Street for lunch. He talked about microcosms, labyrinths, connectness and Borges…” And with those deceptively casual opening lines, filmmaker Iva Radivojevic takes us on a globetrotting (10 countries on five continents!) journey through the porous borderlands of documentary and fiction that’s as much philosophical as it is observational. Traversing both map and territory, Aleph draws its inspiration from the Jorge Luis Borges short story of the same name, a brief tale that literalizes the Hamlet quote (“O God! I […]
by Scott Macaulay on May 7, 2021 -
Watch: Iva Radivojević’s Stunning and Eerie Arctic-Shot Short, UTUQAQ
Premiering online timed to Earth Day from Field of Vision is a stunning and poetic Arctic-shot short, UTUQAQ, directed by Iva Radivojević. Acting as her own cinematographer, Radivojević counterpoints elegant and abstract patterns across sweeping planes of ice with more human-scale documentation of the work of four researchers drilling ice cores in the region’s freezing temperatures. The narration — in Kalaallisut (West Greenlandic) by Aviaja Lyberth — is from the point of the view of the ice itself, evoking the earth’s geological memory as it confronts efforts of the researchers working in the moment to learn about what is being lost […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 22, 2021 -
Trailer Watch: Iva Radivojević’s Aleph
A world premiere I’m highly anticipating out of the upcoming 2021 edition of New Directors/New Films is the second feature from Iva Radivojević, Aleph. From New Directors: In her magical, unpredictable second feature, Belgrade-born, globe-hopping artist Iva Radivojević has created a labyrinthine vision inspired by the writings of Jorge Luis Borges. Using a variety of visual styles that miraculously cohere into one unified and unique aesthetic, the multihyphenate filmmaker and her collaborators offer an episodic structure bending time and space, in which one character seems to unwittingly pass the narrative baton to the next, fashioning a film whose scope extends […]
by Scott Macaulay on Apr 7, 2021 -
The Beautiful Stubborn Loneliness of the Filmmaker-Shooter
Folks who go to artist residencies fall into one of three categories. There are the artists for whom the time and space is more an experiential tool (we’re looking at you, social practitioners), those who strike a healthy balance between socializing and accomplishing an elevated amount of creative work, and those who disappear into an antisocial work bunker, popping up only for communal feedings, knowing upon exiting into the real world they’ll be back in the trenches of freelance gigs, copyediting, teaching work and the reply-all emails that accompany them. I fall into the latter category. Not long ago, I […]
by Mitch McCabe on Jul 7, 2020 -
Outside of the “Business-Oriented U.S.,” A Showcase for U.S. Independent Films: the 2019 American Film Festival in Wroclaw
Cinephiles looking to cook up a zesty decade recap of the best in American indie film could have taken a Polish holiday this fall and landed in the eastern European cultural capital of Wroclaw for the 10th annual American Film Festival. The intensive marathon nods to red-white-and-blue archetypes in branding, which makes festival avatars of such staples of American mythology as motorcycle cops, 18-wheelers, Afro-sporting disco queens, football running backs, astronauts and desperadoes. Its mission, however, is at once more incisive and expansive than all that apple-pie iconography, distilling highlights and discoveries from the year’s major U.S. film gatherings, sprinkled […]
by Steve Dollar on Dec 30, 2019 -
Don’t Fence Me In: Pitching Boundary-Crossing Docs at CPH:FORUM 2018
Of all the various fundraising tools and opportunities at filmmakers’ disposal these days (the majority of them still in the DIY vein), pitch forums present a constant challenge: are they still relevant? With formats increasingly resembling chat or even game shows, today’s pitch forums are becoming performance-driven, the implicit agreement being that decision makers will actively support at least some of the projects presented with funding, distribution and sales opportunities. As someone who works in a freelance capacity helping to choose projects for various pitch forums (although not CPH:FORUM), I see first-hand how the few projects that make the stage […]
by Pamela Cohn on Apr 4, 2018 -
“I Want to Know about You, and I Want Us to be Friends”: Documentary Filmmaker Iva Radivojevic on She Does Podcast
Iva Radivojevic is a documentary director and editor. She was born in Yugoslavia, raised in Cyprus and has lived in New York City since she was 18 years old. Much of her work explores belonging, and draws from poetry and personal experience. Her debut feature, Evaporating Borders, examines migration, tolerance and identity through the experience of asylum seekers in Cyprus. The film has received awards worldwide and was nominated for an International Documentary Association (IDA) Award and a Cinema Eye Honors Spotlight Award and screened over 80 times at festivals, including SXSW, Human Rights Watch FF, Rotterdam IFF, DokuFest and […]
by Elaine Sheldon and Sarah Ginsburg on Feb 24, 2016 -
Scoped Out
When filmmaker Laura Poitras joined journalists Glenn Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill to form the online news site The Intercept, it didn’t seem a certainty that she’d bring film to the site’s reporting on domestic spying, national security and foreign policy issues. After all, even before her Academy Award for documentary CITIZENFOUR, Poitras had shared a Pulitzer Prize and George Polk award for print reporting on NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden appearing in The Guardian and The Washington Post. And, after the awards, Poitras continued covering these stories in print and online — not just for The Intercept, a site owned by […]
by Scott Macaulay on Oct 28, 2015
