Film Screening: 'Waterfront'

Film screening followed by discussion with filmmaker Miloš Jovanović

Thursday, May 25, 2023
5:00 PM - 6:30 PM (Pacific Time)
Kaplan A65

Inviting historical comparisons, the Waterfront appears as a modern-day echo of past injustices. This film explores this juxtaposition - the folding of 19th and 21st century capitalism on the city of Belgrade and its waterfront. What does it mean to call upon de-Ottomanization in the era of post-socialism?

Limited seats available. Register today!

The Center for European and Russian Studies (CERS) in co-sponsorship with the UCLA Department of History and the South East European Film Festival (SEEfest) invite you to the screening of Waterfront, a documentary by Miloš Jovanović. The screening will be followed by discussion with the filmmaker. The event will take place in-person in Kaplan A65 on Thursday, May 25, 2023 at 5:00pm.

About Waterfront

Since 2015, the UAE firm “Eagle Hills” and the Serbian government have collaborated on a 2-billion euro project to revitalize the Savamala, a dilapidated post-industrial neighborhood surrounding Belgrade’s old port and central railroad station. The Belgrade Waterfront envisions a bring future of luxury apartments, high-rises, marinas, hotels, and shopping malls. The Serbian authorities have presented the project as an opportunity to finally ascend to European modernity, finishing a project started in the nineteenth century with the country’s independence from the Ottoman Empire. Yet, the Belgrade Watefront has also been criticized for its displacement of Savamala's residents, its radical intervention in the urban tissue, and the economic relations of inequality it champions. Inviting historical comparisons, the Waterfront appears as a modern-day echo of past injustices. This film explores this juxtaposition - the folding of 19th and 21st century capitalism on the city of Belgrade and its waterfront. What does it mean to call upon de-Ottomanization in the era of post-socialism? What visions of civilization and progress does that bring? Whose stories does it erase? Upon whose backs is the waterfront made? And what is to be done?

55 minutes, in English and Serbian (Serbian parts with English subtitles).
Watch trailer.

Speakers

Miloš Jovanović is Assistant Professor at the UCLA Department of History. He is a historian and urban studies scholar. His research interests include the Balkans, Ottoman and Habsburg Empires, capitalism, Marxist theory and history, and visual methods. He is interested in history as an emancipatory practice. His present research project, Empires on the Danube, examines the role of imperial histories in the making of contemporary urban space, looking at a number of cities formerly associated with the Habsburg Empire in one way or another. He is also completing Cities of Dust and Mud, a book project based on his doctoral dissertation which explores the post-Ottoman urban transformation of two Balkan capitals, Belgrade and Sofia.

Christine Philliou is Professor at UC Berkeley Department of History. Philliou specializes in the political, social, and cultural history of the Ottoman Empire and modern Turkey and Greece as parts of the post-Ottoman world. Her first book, Biography of an Empire: Governing Ottomans in an Age of Revolution (University of California Press, 2011; Greek edition Alexandria Press, 2021; Turkish edition İş Bankası Kültür Press, 2022), examined the changes in Ottoman governance leading up to the Tanzimat reforms of the mid-nineteenth century. It did so using the vantage point of Phanariots, an Orthodox Christian elite that was intimately involved in the day-to-day work of governance even though structurally excluded from belonging to the Ottoman state. Her second book, Turkey: A Past Against History (University of California Press, 2021; Greek edition Alexandria Press, 2022), focuses on the fraught history of the idea of opposition/dissent, connecting literature, politics and the construction of official History in the Ottoman Second Constitutional and Republican period of Turkish history. In it, she highlights the political, personal and intellectual/artistic itinerary of the Ottoman/Turkish writer and perennial dissident Refik Halid Karay (1888-1965).

Related Document: 20230525-Jovanovic-poster-bg-nxr.pdf

Sponsor(s): Center for European and Russian Studies, Department of History, South East European Film Festival (SEEfest)