Nicole Jennifer Adelman talks with Kumjana Novakova about her new powerful film - Silence of Reason. The film focuses on one case of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, known as the Foča Rape Camps trial. Silence of Reason celebrates the strength of the women survivors and amplifies their voices. Listen to the latest True Story episode and learn how significant was the court case in the fight against sexual slavery, violence against women and war crimes, and what led Kumjana to work on such a hard but important topic.
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Kumjana Novakova: “The film is comprised only of archives, forensic archives from the one single court case judged at the International Criminal Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia, the Kunarac et al. case, which is also known within the tribunal as the Foča Rape Camps trial. Every image that you see in the film is used as forensic evidence by the prosecution in the trial itself. …And because I really think that we as filmmakers, documentary filmmakers, the best that we can do is to get as close as possible to the oppressed, none of us can give voice to anyone. But we can make it possible for the voices which are out there to be translated into the public space. This is what we can do with our work and this is how we can, in a way, subvert injustice and we can subvert oppression.”
Kumjana Novakova is a research-based filmmaker, working also as a film curator and lecturer born in Yugoslavia. Kumjana's background is in social sciences. In 2006, she co-founded the Human Rights Film Festival in Sarajevo and acts as its chief curator and director. She was leading the film department of the Museum of Contemporary Arts in Skopje from 2018 to 2021. As an author, Kumjana explores the languages of cinema, researching relationships related to power, war, memories, and un-belonging.
She is interested in developing strategies for creating meaning from the position of filmmaking, and its potentialities as a territory of new collectivities. Her work has been shown and exhibited across the world. Her film Disturbed Earth, co-directed with G. C. Candi, has been shortlisted for the Academy Awards and nominated for Best Feature Length Documentary by the Doc Alliance.
Her new film, Silence of Reason, which won the Human Rights Award at the Sarajevo Film Festival in 2023, traces women's experiences of sexual violence and rape in wartime Bosnia and Herzegovina. Kumjana currently lives between Sarajevo and Skopje.