The Other Side of Everything

Documentary by Mila Turajlic

The award-winning documentary The Other Side of Everything began with a closed door.  A door in the middle of the Mila Turajlic family apartment in Belgrade. "That door never struck me as a child," says the 38-year-old filmmaker. "Only when I was in my late twenties and guests sometimes asked about it did I realize there was something strange about it."In the fifties, when Turajlic's mother was still a girl, a representative of the communist state came to visit one day, drawing a line through the parental home: part of the "bourgeois apartment" was assigned to fellow citizens. The door to the neighbors was sealed, and that was it. "That door is a kind of scar. And, I realized, an ideal starting point for a movie. With the apartment as a symbol for Yugoslavia, for Serbia, for a disintegrated country. "Her great-grandfather, adviser to the king and minister of justice, had the house built himself. It is on a corner in the center of Belgrade: close to the British embassy, the Serbian Supreme Court and the Ministry of Defense bombarded with NATO rockets in the 1990s. You only have to look out the window, as The Other Side of Everything shows, and something is going on in the street: demonstrations, police appearances. The current occupant, Mila's mother Srbijanka Turajric, is a retired professor (71) who, as a protest leader, played a key role in ousting President Milosevic. "Beforehand, I thought she would only tell about our family history," says Mila Turajlic, " and that would be the film." (source: Volkskrant November 22, 2017)