Traveling VIVISECTfest

The new edition of the VIVISECTfest dedicated to the topic “Winning Freedom” will be organised in 12 towns in Serbia- Zaječar, Kikinda, Niš, Leskovac, Vranje, Kragujevac, Beograd, Sombor, Subotica, Vrbas, Pančevo i Ruma, in the period between June and October 2011.

Zaječar  will be the first town to host VIVISECTfest this year. The programme of the sixth edition of the festival will be held June 20-24, 2011.

In 2011 VIVISECTfest in cooperation with local partners will, besides the film programme and photograph exhibition, set up a permanent photograph exhibition “The Universal Declaration of Human Rights“. This exhibition will be realized in towns which have technical and financial conditions for it. Our goal with this activity is to set up a permanent photograph exhibition in partner towns after the realization of the traveling festival.

The photograph exhibition was made in 2008 for the celebration of 60 years of adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. On 10 December 1948, the United Nations General Assembly adopted and proclaimed the GENERAL DECLARATION ON HUMAN RIGHTS as a common document which should be achieved by all peoples and all nations.

Today, the Universal Declaration on Human Rights is a basic international document in the area of human rights. Even though the Declaration of Human Rights is widely accepted, there is a big number of people which are not in the position to demand the respect of their basic human rights either because they are not familiar with it, either because the institutional mechanisms for their implementation are not developed enough.

The photograph exhibition is our modest contribution to the improvement and development of the protection and implementation of human rights. The photograph exhibition is a unique “illustration” of 30 Articles of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights. Photograph authors: Čila David, Andraš Otoš, Aleksandra Erski, Gabor Ifju, Aleksandar Jovanović, Dragutin Savić, Nemanja Savić, Željko Škrbić, Miroslav Ružić, Jaroslav Pap, Andrea Palašti.

In 2009 the exhibition was organised in 17 towns in Serbia (Novi Sad, Subotica, Ruma, Vrbas, Niš, Kikinda, Sremski Karlovci, Sečanj, Leskovac, Zrenjanin, Pančevo, Sombor, Bačka Palanka) and Bosnia and Herzegovina (Mostar, Banja Luka, Sarajevo). On December 10, 2009 the permanent exhibition “The Universal Declaration of Human Rights“ was set up in the office of the Provincial Ombudsman in Novi Sad. On June 14, 2011 the permanent exhibition “The Universal Declaration of Human Rights“ was set up in the office of Commissioner for the Protection of Equality Belgrad.

VIVISECTfest for the second time

in Zaječar 

The Traveling Festival on Human Rights- VIVISECTfest dedicated to the topic WINNING FREEDOM will be officially opened on Monday, June 20 at 7 p.m. in Zaječar, in Youth Center.

The festival of documentary film and photograph will be officialy opened in Zaječar by Danko Nikolić, the president of Zajecar Initiative and Marija Gajicki, programme director of VIVISECTfest.
The traveling Festival on Human Rights – VIVISECTfest is a programme that promotes co-operation and networking of NGOs, youth offices, ombudsmen and cultural institutions in towns of Serbia through the activities that promote respect for human rights and freedom.

The Sixth Edition of VIVISECTfest with the topic "Winning of Freedom" will through the documentary films and photography present the work of authors from different parts of the world with the aim of promoting human rights as legitimate instruments that efficiently protect dignity of human beings and basic human needs, regardless of gender, ethnic or social background, or religious or political affiliation.

The understanding and interpretation of human rights, as defined by the Universal Declaration on Human Rights have been changed in parallel with the human society development, and, as a rule, in the direction of expanding their scope, content, and mechanism for their protection.
Therefore, the activity of improving and developing the human rights culture and their protection is a continuing process which should be fostered and adjusted to specific social-historical, cultural, economic, and other circumstances.

As the previous editions, this edition continues to promote documentary films and photographs of authors of all generations from all over the world.

The Festival on Human Rights represents our modest contribution to the affirmation of the respect of human rights through educational and artistic platform which allow people to learn about their rights and the institutions which guarantee the enforcement and protection of these rights.

Implementation of the Traveling VIVISECTfest programme was supported by NED - National Endowment for Democracy and Provincial Secretary for Culture AP Vojvodina.

VIVISECTfest in Zaječar is organized by NGO Vojvodjanka – Regional initiative and Zajecar Initiative.      

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VIVISECTfest programme – Zaječar

Monday, 20/06/2011

19.00 – Official openning of Jaroslav Pap’s exhibition - Fallen Angels of Communist Ideology

19.30 – Crime Unpunished – Tamás Novák, Fruzsina Skrabski / Hungary / 2010 / 70 min

21.00 – Face the wall – Stefan Weinert / Germany, Luxembourg / 2009 / 85 min

Tuesday, 21/06/2011

19.30 – Heated Blood – Marko Mamuzić / Serbia / 2008 / 51 min

21.00 – Rocking the Nation – Bori Kriza / Hungary/ 2007 / 70 min

Wednesday, 22/06/2011

19.30 –  The Way Up – Shirly Berkovitz / Israel / 2009/ 52 min

21.00 – BAS! Beyond the Red Light – Wendy Champagne /India, Nepal / 2010 / 77 min

Thursday, 23/06/2011

19.30 - Paradiso - Alessandro Negrini / Northern Ireland / 2009 / 60 min

21.00 – Songs of War – Tristan Chytroschek / Germany / 2011 / 52 min

Friday, 24/06/2011

19.30 – Home and Away – An van de Vivere / Belgium / 2010 / 75 min

21.00 – Penalty Kick -  Carlo Ghioni / Canada / 2010 / 14 min

21.15 – The Locker Room - Nisan Katz, Eyal Zusman / Israel / 2009 / 52 min

All the programmes to be implemented within the Project will be free of charge for the audience and visitors.

FILM PROGRAMME

Crime Unpunished - Tamás Novák, Fruzsina Skrabski / Hungary / 2010
The film is about Béla Biszku, communist ex-Minister of the Interior who was one of the arbiters and masterminds of the bloody and cruel retaliations after the Hungarian Revolution in 1956. Biszku was in charge between 1957 and 1961 and he demanded more severe sentences and physical eliminations of the imprisoned revolutionists during regime of the Hungarian Communist Party. The retaliation was much more ruthless than after WWII. Béla Biszku retired in 1989 and has not given an interview to anybody till 2009. The directors managed to make him speak in 2009 however but in a rather tricky way.

Face the Wall - Stefan Weinert / Germany, Luxembourg / 2009
The five life stories told by former East German citizens incarcerated for attempting to flee the Republic in the GDR who are representing a group of around 72,000 ex-convicts are shocking to the core. The subjects speak with extraordinary openness of their struggles with the regime, of horrific prison conditions and interrogation methods. This sensitive documentary maintains a close proximity to its protagonists throughout, examining open wounds and bringing psychological damage to light that have made it impossible for them to live a normal fear-free lives ever since.

Heated Blood - Marko Mamuzić / Serbia / 2008
Seven years after the fall of the Milosevic regime and the revolution of 5th October, Serbia is still a country largely isolated from the rest of the world, and the extreme right parties are stronger from day to day. Most worrying is the fact that the incidents that cause far-right groups, are consisted mostly by very young people, and become public and increasingly after year 2000.  This extremism is a key theme of this film. Autors tried to emphasize and draw attention to the spread of dangerous phenomena such as fascism and neo-Nazism.

Rocking the Nation – Bori Kriza / Hungary/ 2007
A concert tour with ”Romantic Violence”, the cult band of the Hungarian  ”national rock”, and its fans from December 2005 till the fall of 2006. Folk musicians and skinheads, football fans and college students speak of their radical nationalistic views. They started out as a high school band in the 90’s, but today they are one of the top representatives of “national rock”. They claim they are patriots; their role models are the freedom fighters of ’56. They tour former Hungarian territories annexed by Romania and Serbia, play in clubs and at the Hungarian Sziget Festival. They travel tirelessly, for their music is their mission, “to strengthen national identity”, “to shake people up”, “to make people think” at home and abroad. Their concerts are much more than a party for the fans: they have created a community, and a way of life. They sing folk-rock numbers, legends and revisionist songs along with the Ferencvaros football team anthem. Their slogans are rocking: freedom, anti-Communism, Trianon, the Jews, 100% Hungarian, to arms!

The Way Up - Shirly Berkovitz / Israel / 2009
During Ceausescu regime’s rule in Romania abortions had been illegal. As a result, Romenian orphanages became full as many mothers were unable to keep their children. This is where Lian grew up until the age of four. An Israeli couple chose to adopt Lian. Shortly after, it became clear that the home she had been brought to was abusive, and at the age of 14 she ran away and found herself living in the streets.
The way up is the personal story of a street girl’s struggle for survival, led by her dream of reuniting with her birth mother. The film follows Lian for three years and reveals the cruel and tough reality of street life in Tel Aviv.

BAS! Beyond the Red Light– Wendy Champagne / India, Nepal / 2010
How can you create a future from a past that dares not be told?
In BAS! Beyond the Red Light 13 young girls sold into Mumbai’s infamous network of gated brothels confront the inner and outer perils of life after rescue and reveal the very human story inside the big business of child trafficking.
As wards of the court these young victims from remote corners of the Indian subcontinent are flung together and held virtual prisoners in a four-story suburban shelter in Mumbai until they come of age. Here they confront not only the pain of their recent past but also the stark choices in their futures. The film explores this lesser known issue of rehabilitation and reintegration of child victims from these girls point of view. We move between gated brothels and guarded dormitories to a rehearsal studio where the girls practice bhangra dance moves learned from lazy afternoons in front of the communal TV to tell their stories to the rest of the world.
Through intimate, sustained access to these former victims and to Mumbai’s underworld, BAS! Beyond the Red Light interweaves dance rehearsals and candid observations from the girls themselves with testimony from a trafficker, a local Red Light politician and workers at the Rescue Foundation .
Shot over the course of three and a half years and beautifully photographed by cinematographer Katerine Giguere, the film captures the extraordinary beauty and truth of the girls and juxtaposes this against the volatile and visually provocative backdrop of the largest Red Light area on the planet.

Paradiso- Alessandro Negrini / Northern Ireland / 2009
Derry, Northern Ireland: there are plenty of ghettos around the world, all of them with their own injustice, each of them living on its knees.  There is one ghetto condemned to something even worse: it has forgotten its music.  It’s The Fountain, in the heart of the city: once a vibrant community, where people used to dance together despite religious differences, now a disappearing Protestant neighborhood killed by fear and politics and turned into an open air prison, now living behind a fence.
Roy Arbuckle, a musical troubadour, decides it’s time to challenge one of the monstrosities left by the war in Northern Ireland: fear. He wants to reunite his former showband, The Signetts and his formers musicians, nowadays in their seventies, that lived the heady glamour of Ireland Show band era, in a high-risk attempt to try to do something that would be normal anywhere else but not yet in Northern Ireland: having a major dance night, inviting their old enemies and get Protestants and Catholics dancing together. If it wasn’t enough, for this event Roy wants to open up the stronghold of Protestant heritage and culture in Derry: the Memorial Hall, once the most popular dance hall in the heart of the city.
A colorful, melancholic and ironic musical journey through a ghetto that, even if it find itself in its last dance, it doesn’t want to miss a single step of it. Let’s save pessimism for better times.

Songs of  War– Tristan Chytroschek/ Germany / 2011
In ’Songs of War’, we explore the extraordinary harmony between music and violence. The film’s main protagonist is Sesame Street composer, Christopher Cerf. He always wanted his music to be fun and entertaining. But then he learned that his songs had been used to torture prisoners in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. He is stunned by this abuse of his work and wants to find out how this could happen.
Cerf embarks on a journey to learn what makes music such a powerful stimulant. In the process, he speaks to soldiers, psychologists and prisoners tortured with his music at Guantanamo and find out how the military has been employing music as a potent weapon for hundreds of years.

Home and Away - Ann Van de Vyvere / Belgium / 2010
Home & Away is a documentary film that questions the concepts of housing, home, privacy and valuable objects. The film follows modern day nomads. In other words, them who don’t have permanent address and are always ‘on the go’. They discuss the relationship between humans and objects. This is the story of the characters, a collection of 10 portraits of contemporary nomads on their most prized possessions. This is the story of the characters. At times those stories can be hilarious, moving or even heartbreaking. This is a picture how is to be on the road all the time: the moving and the freedom. It questions what people around the globe understand as living conditions, not just physically but mentally as well.

Penalty Kick - Carlo Ghioni / Canada / 2010
If soccer is a moral equivalent of war, could a penalty kick decide a battle? A man confronts the pattern of his life and his penchant for self-sabotage: as a youth he wasted a penalty kick to show off for the sake of revenge: as a young captain he gives in to temptation and shows off in a verbal duel that will cost dearly: no reinforcements arrive when needed. But the attackers accept a novel way to settle things: the disputed territory will go to the winners of a soccer game. And the game comes down to a penalty kick…

The Locker Room - Nisan Katz, Eyal Zusman / Israel / 2009
An international documentary project that exposes the human dramas that take place in locker rooms during soccer matches around the world, while focusing on social, cultural and religious themes. Soccer is much more than a competition between individuals or countries. It crosses borders and social differences, joining humanity in one common language and gathering nations together around a single ball on a single field. However, one place remains concealed: the locker room.
These stories occur simultaneously in three different locations Katmandu, Nazareth and Zanzibar. A Story of Tibetan monk's team (Nepal) and their captain are soccer fanatics who are willing to do anything in order to play. A Story of Nazareth multi-national team where Muslims, Christians, Druze and Jews play together in true coexistence, fighting to remain in the Israeli Soccer League. A story of the entire continent and its inhabitants who have one main goal: to leave. In this case, soccer is a refuge and the players’ way to dream of a different life.

Photograph Exhibition
Fallen Angels of Communist Ideology

The photograph exhibition “Fallen Angels of Communist Ideology” presents evidence on December Revolution in Romania in 1989 at its source – in Timisoara. These are the photographs of highly professional quality, and, at the same time, very precious documents not only for the recent history of Romanian people, but also for the chronicle of the communism breakdown in Europe. They were taken by a great master of photojournalism profession Jaroslav Pap.

The collapse of the totalitarian communist regimes on the Old Continent began in Poland and Hungary, and then the wave of democratic coups spread to other “warehouse” countries. That this would happen sooner or later was prophesied by many, but no one had an inkling that this would end so quickly, spontaneously, and easy. In the autumn of 1989, in only some forty days, the very foundations of the system, which was imposed to East Europe with the help of Soviet tanks during and after the World War II, and afterwards it was maintained with the same force longer than 40 years, were torn like a house of cards.

A very important role, even key one, in the disassembly of this system and the demolition of Berlin Wall, the symbol of the divided Europe, was played by Soviet Union again. This time, under the leadership of a great reformer Michail Gorbachev. For, if there had been no democratic changes in Soviet Union represented in perestroika, soundness, and new opinion, and making Breznhev’s doctrine on “restricted sovereignty” of the countries of “realistic communism” ineffective, which hung above them like Democles’ sword and crushed any idea to abandon Moscow “gospel”, it is not so probable that the democratic changes in Poland, Hungary, Democratic Republic of Germany, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, and Romania would have come so soon. When the sword was eliminated, communist leaders in the above countries were disarmed and faced the decades of their subjects full of anger. And than, the thing that had to happen sooner or later, actually happened. People went out to the streets and said: “That’s enough!”

Besides, the rebellion was not directed against the idea of brotherhood among people and social justice, likewise, it was not stimulated by anti-sovietism due to some chauvinistic motives, rather people rose to liberate themselves from inhuman political system imposed externally, futile economy which led them to the edge of hunger, and especially to get rid of the rule and privileges of their own “red bourgeoisie”. They discovered that a simple deceit by professional prophets of new “Marxist ideology” was beyond promised “communist heaven”, and this was enough to seal the fate of the “realistic communism” in their countries.

The disappearance of communism from European political scene happened relatively quickly in all former socialist countries, apart from Romania. “Ceausesku era” was terminated by spilling blood.

December revolution began, by coincidence, in Timisoara. The first victims fell there, and then, the rebellion spread to the whole country. It was so fierce that, at one moment, the West asked Soviet Union to take military intervention and stop the bloodshed. Soviet military assistance would, without doubt, have been precious for faster and painless crash of Ceausesku’s regime. However, the fact that the freedom was achieved by Romanian people themselves, without anyone’s help, was exceptionally important for the pride of the nation, to raise its self-awareness and enthusiasm to focus to spiritual, political, and social renewal. And it managed to do so. Today, Romania is the European Union member together with other East European countries of the former “realistic socialism” which, after the Berlin Wall crash, liberated themselves from Moscow’s “brotherly embrace”.
There are no totalitarian communist regimes in Europe any more. This, unfortunately, does not mean that all former socialist countries of the Old Continent dealt with the transition in the equally successful manner, and that they, to the same extent, enjoy the benefits of political freedoms of parliamentary democracy and market economy. In some of them, ruling political elite tried to maintain their positions by replacing the class integrative principle in state structure with the national one, thus, the totalitarian and communist regime was transformed into inhuman, repressive creation of extreme nationalism. A terrible example for this is provided by a tragic, bloody breakdown of the former Yugoslavia.

Jan Briza

Festival on Human Rights – VIVISECTfest came out of the need to draw public attention to the attacks on human dignity which were getting more and more frequent.
In 2004, the non-governmental organisation Vojvodjanka – Regional  Initiative launched the Festival on Human Rights – VIVISECTfest in Novi Sad, with the intention to develop an all-year-round educational and artistic platform for presentations and discussions on the issue of human rights.

The aim of this programme is to allow people to learn about their rights and the institutions which guarantee the enforcement and protection of these rights through a programme consisting of cultural and educational content at any time and any place in Serbia. On the other hand, this programme allows for different authorial perspectives – both domestic and from abroad – to be shown at one place.

The first edition of VIVISECTfest (2004): War in the Former Yugoslavia – View from Inside and Outside

The second edition of VIVISECTfest (2006): My Enemies: Nationalism and Xenophobia

The third edition of VIVISECTfest (2008): Terrorism, No Thank You!

The forth edition of VIVISECTfest (2008): Totalitarian Regimes - View from Inside and Outside

The fifth edition of VIVISECTfest (2010): Welcome to the Real World

The sixth edition of VIVISECTfest (2011): Winning Freedom

The project activities are being implemented through an annual programme that includes preparation and organisation of each new edition of the festival in Novi Sad dedicated to a pressing issue, and organisation of a travelling festival in the country and abroad.

The travelling festivals are organised according to the following principles: each year, new locations are included. On the other hand, the locations previously visited by the VIVISECTfest become parts of the network of our permanent partners.

Welcome to the world of VIVISECTfest!

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VIVISECTfest in your town

If you are interested and if you have the capacity to organise the VIVISECTfest programme in your town, please contact us by phone + 381 21 526 292, +381 63 8398060 or by e-mail gajickim@eunet.rs