Museum of the Revolution

“To safeguard the truth about us, were the words architect Vjenceslav Richter used, when he presented his plan for a Museum of the Revolution to be built in Belgrade in 1961… Director Srđan Keča takes this — with great propaganda archive material — as the starting point for his version of the truth as he sees it in a film that is quite as unconventional as Richter wanted the museum to be.” — Tue Steen Müller on Filmkommentaren.dk

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“Keča employs a strategy similar to that of another contemporary documentary master, the Italian Gianfranco Rosi, whose films are also about the marginalized and outsiders. He spends a lot of time with his protagonists, slowly gaining and earning their trust, until the camera is hardly an actor in the action and is hardly noticed by those portrayed. There is no trace of suffering pornography in this film, no exploitation of poverty and pain. Keča doesn't film the central, important, sensational moments of these lives, he doesn't exploit his characters to get particularly 'authentic' or dramatic material (…) Through this process of omission, the moments we see seem like fragments of a larger whole, a larger world, a larger life and, of course, post-socialism.” — Philipp Stadelmaier in Die Zeit

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“With Keča, it is not language that is in the foreground, but a certain atmosphere, the materiality of a late capitalist society whose foundations are in danger of collapsing. (...) The seasons come and go in this film. Where there was just snow, two friends are now lying singing by the water. Soon a concert hall will be built above the basement as a meeting place for the citizens, soon Mara will die, and soon Milica will go to school. Her father, who only appears on the phone, is about to be released from prison. 'So time is a today, from a hundred years ago to now,' wrote Sasha Marianna Salzmann in the novel 'Außer sich' (2017) and thus gave a good concept of time that makes this film describable: a film that knows about yesterday and tomorrow, but celebrates and conserves a today that crumbles to dust the moment it becomes tangible and nameable." — Anne Küper on Critic.de