Projects
CBA TRIESTE
The Cinematic Battle for the Adriatic – Films, Frontiers and the Trieste Crisis (Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship, 2021–2024)
The project CBA TRIESTE examines cinematic practices related to the Trieste Crisis (1945-1954), a diplomatic struggle over the Italian-Yugoslav borderlands at the outset of the Cold War. The research compares Italian and Yugoslav (Slovenian, Croatian) and historical and contemporary perspectives on the struggle for this territory, by investigating three levels of cinematic action: film production, film festival circulation, and film reception through awards and press reviews. The project will make widely accessible a collection of related cinematic cultural heritage through a digital archive. In doing so, it will provide a contribution to the study of cinema, film festivals and cultural memory, and a practical toolkit for researchers and cultural programmers.
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 101020692 (MSCA-IF-GF).
It is conducted at the Department of Philosophy and Cultural Heritage of the University Ca’ Foscari of Venice, in collaboration with the University of Ljubljana and the film archives from Italy, Slovenia, Croatia and Serbia.
The Yugoslav Documentary and Short Film Festival, 1954 – 2004. From Yugoslav Socialism to Serbian Nationalism
Une histoire culturelle et politique du Festival yougoslave du film documentaire et du court-métrage, 1954-2004. : Du socialisme yougoslave au nationalisme serbe (Doctoral research, 2012 – 2017)
The doctoral research analysed the Yugoslav Documentary and Short Film Festival’s programmes, from its founding in 1954 to the official end of its Yugoslav era in 2004, when it opened to foreign films and changed its name to the Belgrade Documentary and Short Film Festival. The project examined how the festival participated in the process of constructing of a collective (national) identity in two authoritarian states created immediately before, that is, during its long existence. Both were born out of war but were of completely opposite natures – socialist and multinational Yugoslavia (1943) and post-socialist Yugoslavia, on the way to becoming a national and capitalist state (1992). Bearing in mind audiences’ tendency to understand documentary film as a credible expression of reality and not as an artistic interpretation thereof, the project examined which versions of “reality” were presented to them through the festival’s programmes in the turbulent social and political circumstances of the two periods under consideration.
This research was funded by the Foundation for heritage Sciences PATRIMA – Laboratory of Excellence LabEx PATRIMA.
It was conducted at the University Paris Saclay (Versailles-Saint-Quentien en Yvelines) at the Centre for Cultural History of Contemporary Societies.
This project has resulted in the book: JELENKOVIC, D., Festival jugoslovenskog dokumentarnog i kratkometražnog filma (1954-2004). Od jugoslovenskog socijalizma do srpskog nacionalizma [Yugoslav Documentary and Short Film Festival (1954-2004). From Yugoslav Socialism to Serbian Nationalism], Beograd: Filmski centar Srbije, 2023 (Serbian, 558 pages, ISBN 978-86-7227-130-0)