Serbian Underground Cinema @ Black Sun This Saturday

Black Sun returns to the Triskel, Cork, on Saturday 31st March and this promises to be a very special edition. The live acts, curated as always by Vicky Langan, are artist/composer John Wiese, Irish band Wölfbait, and the consistently unmissable combination of First Blood Part II & Wölflinge herself.

The film which I've selected to screen is a piercing cry of defiance swelling up from an astonishing and all-but-unknown zone of film history. Miroslav-Bata Petrović and Julijana Terek’s Personal Discipline (1983), without doubt the rarest film Black Sun has yet presented, is a product of the early ‘80s Serbian underground. Throbbing with punk attitude, it details a private ritual enacted by writer/performer Terek spilling onto the street in an irresistible upsurge of self-assertion in the face of repressive societal indifference. The pounding rhythms of Petrović’s aggressive editing combine with Terek’s beguiling concentration to create an experience liable to leave the viewer gasping for breath... We are delighted to be giving Personal Discipline its Irish premiere!

A big thank you to Vassily Bourikas for leading us to this work in his amazing retrospective of underground film from the former Yugoslavia at the 2009 Thessaloniki International Film Festival.