Skopje, 29 January 2025 (MIA) — Macedonian filmmaker Kumjana Novakova's "Silence of Reason" (2023) will be shown at London's Tate Modern museum on Jan. 29 and at King's College London on Jan. 30. 

According to organizers in a press release, the King’s College screening will be followed by a panel discussion with the film’s director and some of the university’s most prominent professors and researchers, including Cécile Bourne-Farrell and Denisa Kostovicova.

This is the third large world museum to screen Novakova's "Silence of Reason", after the Museum of Modern Art in New York showed it in February 2024 and the Centre Pompidou in Paris in March 2024.

According to the filmmaker, "Silence of Reason" documents the systemic rape and sexual enslavement perpetrated against women by the Bosnian Serb army during the Bosnian War (1992-95). The film presents first-person testimonies, evidence and court findings from the 2000 Foča Rape Camp Trial at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, the first international trial to prosecute rape and sexual enslavement as war crimes and crimes against humanity.

The film "abstracts representations of violence while amplifying the voices of those who would not be silenced" and shows the landscapes where some of the crimes were committed. 

"Often blurry or distorted, the images mirror how memory works when traumatic experiences occur," the filmmaker wrote.

The film has won more than 20 international awards – including the Best Directing award in the Envision Competition at IDFA in Amsterdam; the Cinéma du réel International Award 2024; Spain's Punto de Vista Grand Prix for Best Film; Canada's Hot Docs award for Best Mid-Length Documentary; the Heart of Sarajevo for Human Rights award; and the Best Film award in the Brave Balkans program of Author’s Film Festival in Belgrade.

Novakova is a Macedonian research-based filmmaker, curator and lecturer. In 2006 she co-founded the Pravo Ljudski Film Festival in Sarajevo. She led the Film Department of the Museum of Contemporary Arts in Skopje from 2018 to 2021. 

Her work has been shown and exhibited at festivals and galleries across the world. Her film "Disturbed Earth" (2021), co-directed with Guillermo Carreras-Candi, was shortlisted for the Academy Awards. She currently lives between Sarajevo and Skopje.

"Silence of Reason" is a Macedonian-Bosnian co-production, which was made possible with the support of BIRN.

The Tate London screening has been organized in collaboration with the Visual and Embodied Methodologies Network, the Art and Conflict Hub and the War Crimes Research Group at King’s College London. Novakova’s visit to London is fully supported by Tate Modern. mr/