Mila Turajlic

Mila Turajlic, born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, is a filmmaker and visual artist whose documentary works rely on a combination of oral histories, film archives, and found footage to create a new reflexive language that confronts memory with political and historical narratives being erased. Her most recent project, the documentary diptych Scenes from the Labudovic Archives – a road trip through the birth of the Third World project – premiered at TIFF and IDFA in fall 2022. Her film The Other Side of Everything (2017) was HBO Europe's first coproduction with Serbia. It won 32 awards, including the Best Documentary Film award at IDFA, the SCAM Award for Best Documentary in 2021, and was nominated for the European Parliament's LUX Prize. Mila's first feature documentary, Cinema Komunisto (2011), screened at over 100 festivals and won 16 awards, including the Gold Hugo at the Chicago International Film Festival and the FOCAL Award for Creative Use of Archival Footage. In 2018, she was commissioned by MoMA in New York to create archival-based video installations for their flagship exhibition on Yugoslav modernist architecture. Works from her long-term artistic research project Non-Aligned: Scenes from the Labudovic Archives were commissioned for the 2022 Berlin Biennale and exhibited internationally. Mila has received fellowships from Columbia University's Ideas and Imagination Fellowship, as well as artist grants from the Sharjah Foundation and Chicken & Egg. She is a co-founder and former chair of the board of DOKSerbia, the association of Serbian documentary filmmakers. In 2020, Mila was invited to join the documentary branch of the AMPAS (Oscars). She was named a Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government in 2022.