Original Title: Silence of Reason

Year: 2023

Length: 63 min
Film Category: Feature Documentary

Country of Production: North Macedonia
Country of Co-Production: Bosnia and Herzegovina

Cast & Credits

Director: Kumjana Novakova
Director of Photography: Archive
Editor: Jelena Maksimovic

Text Selection and Editing: Kumjana Novakova
Sound: Vladimir Zivkovic

Graphic Design: Elena Dinovska Zarapchiev
VFX: Nuvit Bingol

Production Design: Kumjana Novakova
Producer: Kumjana Novakova
Production: Medea
Co-production: Pravo Ljudski

Film Synopsis:

Forensic video essay built as a performative research into the first international criminal tribunal case to enter convictions for rape as a form of torture and for sexual enslavement as crime against humanity. While working solely with visual archive and testimonies, Silence of Reason acts as a memory itself: elusive, fluid, rejecting framing, and moving in all directions, both spatial and temporal. The singular experiences of violence and torture by women from the Foča rape camps during the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina become our collective memories, surpassing time and space.

Director's Biography

Kumjana Novakova, originally born in Macedonia, Yugoslavia, has worked in the field of film and arts since 2006. In 2006 she co-founded the Pravo Ljudski Film Festival in Sarajevo, and acts as its chief curator and director. She was leading the Film Department of the Museum of Contemporary Arts in Skopje as a Film Curator for 3 years.

She is currently an associated professor at the Non-fiction department of ESCAC, Barcelona, Spain, and has formerly taught at the Béla Tarr's film.factory in Sarajevo.

As an author, her research lays between cinema and contemporary video art, often exploring how moving images address identities, memories and the collective self. Kumjana currently lives between Sarajevo and Skopje, North Macedonia.