Mila Turajlić

Mila Turajlić, born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, is an award-winning filmmaker and visual artist whose documentary works draw on a combination of oral histories, film archives, fiction, and found footage to fabricate a new, reflexive language that confronts memory and ruins with the disappearing narratives of history. Her most recent project, the documentary diptych Non-Aligned & Ciné-Guerrillas: Scenes from the Labudović Reels, an archival road trip through the birth of the Third World, premiered at TIFF and IDFA in autumn 2022. Her film The Other Side of Everything (2017) was HBO Europe’s first co-production with Serbia. It won 32 awards, including the IDFA Award for Best Documentary Film and the IDA Best Writing award, and was nominated for the European Parliament LUX Prize. Mila’s debut feature documentary, Cinema Komunisto (2011), played at over 100 festivals and won 16 awards, including the Gold Hugo at the Chicago International Film Festival and the FOCAL Award for Creative Use of Archival Footage. In 2018, she was commissioned by MoMA to create archive-based video installations for a landmark exhibition on Yugoslav modernist architecture. Works from her long-term artistic research project Non-Aligned Newsreels were curated for the 2022 Berlin Biennale, IDFA on Stage, and international exhibitions. Turajlić has been awarded fellowships from the Columbia University Institute for Ideas and Imagination, and artist grants from the Sharjah Foundation and Chicken & Egg. In 2020, she was invited to join the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Documentary Branch. She was named Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres by the French government in 2022.

Contributions