Icarus Films Selects Aug. 13 For The DVD Debut Of Documentary Filmmaker Mila Turajlić’s The Other Side of Everything

Icarus films announced this past week that Serbian documentary filmmaker Mila Turajlić’s very personal look at the history of Serbia, The Other Side of Everything, will be making its domestic DVD debut on Aug. 13.

It has been a long, but very fruitful, road to the home entertainment marketplace for Turajlić’s documentary, which is built around the history her family’s home in Belgrade (more on that in a minute).   It opened at the Toronto International Film Festival in mid-September of 2017 and then proceeded to work the festival circuit for nearly two years … and that is even after Icarus gave it a two-theatre arthouse showcase in July of last year.

During this globetrotting tour, The Other Side of Everything pulled in numerous awards and glowing critical reviews … and, as is often the case, it takes a home entertainment push to get a film of this caliber out to a much-deserved wider audience.   Icarus Films has taken its time building the awareness levels and that will certainly pay dividends come Aug. 13.

Turajalic’s family — her great-grandfather — acquired a roughly 2,600 foot apartment in a Belgrade building that also housed the Ministry of Defense and the Supreme Court, plus several foreign embassies.   When Tito came to power in the aftermath of World War II, much of the apartment — consider “bourgeois” — was divided up into smaller units, with rooms locked off.  

This is the life that her mother, Srbijanka, was born into.   Locked rooms and a communist paradise ... friends were instructed to knock three times, so that the family would know it was not the secret police (they only knocked once!!).   She would becume a university professor and a pro-democracy activist.   

It is through her mother and the history of the apartment that Mila constructs her film.   A history lesson of Serbia unfolds that is both chilling … and surprisingly, uplifting as her mother also had the belief that things would some day get better.

Filmmaker Mila Turajlić weaves her tale with interviews with her mother and friends and blends in archival footage — and the history the apartment, where she too grew up — to give us insights into the history of a country that is often misunderstood.

The Other Side of Everything is presented in Serbian with English subtitles.