WHEN THE PHONE RANG

Writer-director Iva Radivojević is available for interviews.

WHEN THE PHONE RANG (Kada je zazvonio telefon) by writer-director Iva Radivojević is celebrating its world premiere in the Cineasti del Presente Competition at the Locarno Film Festival 2024.

Based on the writer-director’s personal experience of leaving crisis-stricken Yugoslavia of the 1990s, WHEN THE PHONE RANG investigates memory and the creation of personal and collective myths.

Through a reconstruction of an important phone call, WHEN THE PHONE RANG addresses the nature of remembering and dislocation. In the main protagonist’s eleven-year-old mind the phone call erases her entire country, history and identity.

SYNOPSIS

The story centers around a phone call that was received one Friday in the spring of 1992. Lana, an eleven-year-old girl alone at home, is the only person to answer the phone. The call arrives from another state delivering news of a death. It is this call that seemingly disintegrates the country and the girl’s entire reality. The war that will ravage the country has already started but the war is not the center of this story, only its backdrop. This call, which brought news of her grandfather’s death, remains as the most vivid memory in the girl’s mind decades later, as a constant presence.

The phone call as a recurring event in the story brings together a series of recollections which are assembled to build a larger story. Each memory is called forth by a phone call, and thus the film is divided into eleven events, eleven phone calls. Each event begins with a phone ringing and ends with the packing of suitcases and departure.

Iva Radivojević was born in Belgrade and spent her early years in Yugoslavia, Cyprus and eventually NYC. She is an artist and filmmaker who currently divides her time between Athens and Lesbos. Iva’s films have screened at the New York Film Festival, New Directors/New Films, Rotterdam IFF, CPH:DOX, Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival, DocLisboa, Museum of Modern Art (NYC), Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art and were commissioned by ARTE La Lucarne and Field of Vision. Her award-winning feature documentary “Evaporating Borders” (2014), executive produced by Laura Poitras, screened at more than 30 international film festivals, including IFFR, SXSW, Hot Docs, DokuFest (awarded Best Balkan Doc); Doc Lisboa (awarded RTP Prize for Best Investigation Film); FIFIG (Coup de Coeur de Jury); Chicago Underground Film Festival (Best Feature); Thessaloniki Doc Fest, Sarajevo, RIDM, Jihlava, Taiwan. et al. She is the recipient of the Sundance Art of Non-Fiction Fellowship, Guggenheim Fellowship, Jerome Fellowship, NYFA Fellowship, Princess Grace Special Project Award and Film Fellowship. Avenue of The Living, her new art book, was recently published by Big Black Mountain Press. She’s a PhD candidate at Villa Arson in Nice.

WHEN THE PHONE RANG is produced by Andrijana Sofranić Šućur and Marija Stojnić of
Set Sail Films (Serbia), Iva Radivojević, Ivaasks Films (USA) in association with Madeleine Molyneaux, Picture Palace Pictures (USA).

With support from Film Center Serbia, Ministry of Culture of Serbia, Princess Grace Foundation, Chicken and Egg Pictures, Hungarian Film Incentive.

International sales are handled by Lights On.

Production Companies:
Set Sail Films
setsailfilmsrs@gmail.com
www.setsailfilms.rs

Ivaasks Films
info@ivaasks.com
www.ivaasks.com

World Sales:
Lights On
lightson@lightsonfilm.org
www.lightsonfilm.com

©/CREDITS:

Stills: © Set Sail Films and Ivaasks Films