“Geographies of Survival”: Kumjana Novakova Discusses Her Sarajevo Film Festival Human Rights Award-Winning Silence of Reason

Described as “performative research into the court archive of the Kunarac et al. case known as the ‘Foca Rape Camp Trial’” before the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY), Kumjana Novakova’s Silence of Reason took this critic’s prize for the most powerful nonfiction film at the 29th Sarajevo Film Festival (August 11–18). Silence of Reason, which runs a swift 63 minutes, follows Novakova’s prior feature, the Oscar-shortlisted Disturbed Earth (2021), co-directed with Guillermo Carreras-Candi. Along with eerie images of rural stillness and an ambient sound design, in which nature is heard loud and clear, the breathtakingly cinematic, archive-based essay pairs a poetic voiceover with the scrolling testimonies of anonymized women, whose voices are necessarily distorted. These are the survivors of rape and sexual enslavement during the war that shattered the Balkans — and birthed the Sarajevo Film Festival — and for whom these pastoral locations can only evoke memories of unbearable unseen pain. Just prior to the closing night ceremony, where Silence of Reason walked away with the Human Rights Award, Documentary reached out to the Macedonia-born Novakova, a busy multihyphenate who is also an international teacher and curator, and even a co-founder of her own Sarajevo-based fest. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

To read my interview visit Documentary magazine.