ACT alumnus Ian Soroka (SMACT ’15)’s debut feature film, Greetings From Free Forests, will be having its North American Premiere on Sunday, April 21 at Lincoln Center, New York City. The film won the Grand Prix at DocLisboa in 2018, the City of Lisbon Award For Best International Competition Film.
Drifting through the densely forested landscape of southern Slovenia—Greetings From Free Forests, like a lifting fog, reveals a refuge of embedded historical memory. The film travels alongside the testimonies of local hunters, foresters, cavers, and foragers among others—orbiting around an absence left by radical struggle after it has come to fruition and since faded. During WWII, this forest served as a sanctuary for the Partisan Liberation Front, who were resisting the Fascist occupation of Yugoslavia. Remnants of this event can still be found throughout the forest in various states of decay, but also within images that sought to preserve the revolution’s emancipatory energy for future generations; images now stored in an underground film archive buried within the forest itself, depicting both the violence and the hope that came with radical change.
Director’s Statement:
Landscape does not exist outside of history. On the contrary, it is a social space that exists in a cycle of constant yet incomplete erasure and re-articulation. A step into landscape is a step into the historical. At its center, Greetings From Free Forests plays with the gap between an event and its polyvalent representations. The question being how can one speak about what can no longer be accessed, between the void of an event and the scraps left behind, pointing to the absence as an animal leaves its tracks in the mud?
The screening and discussion is on Sunday, April 21 at Lincoln Center.
