Upside Down

Colour, 35 mm
Macedonia, Croatia, Serbia, 2007, 105 min
WP – World premiere
Section: East of the West - Films in Competition

Synopsis

Hideous corners of the city, scenes without a trace of sophistication, depressing enclosed spaces – this is the setting chosen for the desperate life drama of young Jan Ludvik. Its individual chapters are recalled as retrospectives by Jan himself as he travels in a train hurtling through the darkening landscape, in the company of a random female passenger whose miserable exterior renders her the embodiment of the bleakest of destinies. Jan was a gifted student and, by some strange quirk of fate, also a talented circus artist, but the world in which he lives drives him only to self-destructive actions. Everything is marked by degradation, even love, for which cheap porn clubs are often an eloquent stage, and whose object is a palpably degenerate girl; several scenes are deliberately set in dingy, graffiti-covered urinals. Upside Down presents a modernised version of the film expressionism of the past; in this case, the wasted life of an individual forms a parallel to the disintegration engulfing society as a whole, a society which lacks spiritual horizons.

About the director

Igor Ivanov (b. 1973, Skopje, Macedonia) studied philosophy and began his film career in 1993, when he began directing a series of films for television. Between the years 1995 and 2004 he made several documentaries and short films; one of them, the 15-minute-long Bugs (Bubački, 2004), won the Golden Leopard at the Locarno festival. The title Upside Down, an adaptation of the novel Navel of the World by contemporary Macedonian writer Venko Andonovski, is his feature film debut. The film clearly revives the poetic quality of the so-called “Black Wave” in Yugoslav film during the 1960s, which closely examined the afflictions of society’s “other face” and the fatal dimensions of human existence.