I’ve been making films for many years now, at the unusual intersection of US independent and East-European cinema, and teaching at a university in New York. When COVID hit, it made me re-evaluate everything I was doing. I stopped the projects I was working on as they seemed superfluous in that reality. To me, the global response to the pandemic demonstrated like nothing before the shocking inability of international and national institutions to cooperate and deal efficiently and equitably with a planetary crisis. And now, it almost seems as if nothing had happened; it’s just “business as usual.” But it’s […]
by Vladan Nikolic on Nov 19, 2024Director Vladan Nikolic is currently in post-production on his latest film, Everything That Will Happen Has Already Happened, and preparing for a crowdfunding campaign to raise final costs. The filmmakers have shared with Filmmaker a teaser trailer, above, as well as the following statement about the film, which plans to premiere in festivals in 2024 Everything That Will Happen Has Already Happened, a very ambitious no budget narrative feature film is in the works. Billed as a “collaborative film,” led by filmmaker and professor Vladan Nikolic, it was made with the help of filmmakers and actors from around the world. […]
by Filmmaker Staff on Jul 7, 2023As Vladan Nikolic’s Zenith continues its slow roll-out — finishing its U.S. screenings while premiering on Amazon and iTunes — I thought I’d post on the blog this piece on the film that originally ran in slightly different form in our Winter, 2011 issue. “What is Zenith?” was the question posed on About Top Secret and other conspiracy-related websites last Spring. Paranoid-minded posters jumped in and followed a breadcrumb-trail of online clues relating to everything from the Bavarian Illuminati and fluoridated drinking water to biochemistry and the New World Order. They clicked through a maze of 50 other websites (priestoftruth.com, […]
by Scott Macaulay on May 4, 2011Directed by Anonymous (or, maybe, “experiment supervisor” Vladan Nikolic), Zenith is described as a “paranoid sci-fi found object from the future,” and it’s inspired by the notorious Milgram experiment, a real psychology experiment exploring man’s potential for both acquiescence to authority and cruelty. Wrote Michael Atkinson in the Village Voice: “The film they don’t want you to see,” by “Anonymous,” shouts the teaser, prefaced by warnings of legal threats and “illegal” images. Zenith comes off at first blush as merely a spurt of faux-transgression looking for rubberneckers. But it’s actually a densely written, sparsely filmed dystopia, using the wasteyards and […]
by Scott Macaulay on Oct 8, 2010