Archive of films Upside Down / Upside Down

North Macedonia / Croatia / Serbia
2007, 105 min

Section: East of the West - Competition
Year: 2007

Jan is the type of romantic malcontent who can’t find rest, who continually hurts people and gets hurt himself. This dark, raw and uncompromising Macedonian film presents a gloomy testimony of the degradation of the life of the individual and society as a whole.

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.

Contacts

Sektor Film
8 Mart No. 4, 1000, Skopje
North Macedonia
Tel: +389 2 329 6619
Fax: +389 2 322 7790
E-mail: [email protected]
www: www.sektor.com.mk

Mainframe Production
Nova cesta 60, 10000, Zagreb
Croatia
Tel: +385 1 382 1155
Fax: +385 1 483 6039
E-mail: [email protected]
www: www.mainframeproduction.com

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About the film

Color, 35 mm
World premiere

Section:	East of the West - Competition

Director:	Igor Ivanov
Screenplay:	Venko Andonovski, Igor Ivanov
Dir. of Photography:	Tomi Salkovski
Music:	Zoran Spasovski
Editor:	Igor Andreevski
Producer:	Vladimir Anastasov, Igor Nola
Production:	Sektor Film
Cast:	Milan Tociniovski, Sanja Trajkovic, Slavisha Kajevski
Contact:	Sektor Film, Mainframe Production

Guests

Igor Ivanov

Film Director, Film Director

Vladimir Anastasov

Producer, Producer

Tomi Salkovski

Producer

Igor A. Nola

Producer

Miroslav Pogelšek

Film Crew, Film Crew