close-up of a man and a woman behind a chain-link fencealr

Where to After the Rain?
(Kade po doždot)

Screening on Film
Directed by Vladan Slijepčević.
With Stanislava Pešić, Ali Raner, Lado Leskovar.
Yugoslavia, 1967, 35mm, color, 89 min.
Macedonian with English subtitles.
Print source: Cinematheque of North Macedonia

“New film” (novi film) encapsulates a loose, extensive mélange of works from the Yugoslav 60s that, according to Daniel Goulding, wrestled in different ways “to increase the latitude for individual and collective artistic expression and to free film from dogmatism and bureaucratic control.” Where to After the Rain? is a forgotten marvel, a courtship tale that not only exemplifies new film’s signature formal tropes—sinuous, unrestrained camerawork foremost among them—but also allegorizes the movement’s central tensions and contradictions. The film (produced by Macedonia’s Vardar Film in Skopje) scarcely features in historical overviews, even as it articulates one of the finest, smartest and most durably obstinate parables of freedom, mediatized expression, inhibited (female) desire and (anti)conformism in Yugoslav art and beyond. Thematizing and tackling entrenched petit-bourgeois strictures, Vladan Slijepčević nevertheless stays ambivalent, departing from any position of unambiguous, straightforward dissidence. Where to is internationalist in atmosphere and spirit if not in cast and crew demographics. A Serbo-Croatian beat cover of The Who’s “It’s Not True” headlines the film’s soundtrack, while news reports (in French and Russian) from the raging war in Vietnam are heard over the radio in a Mercedes. One climactic scene is a tongue-in-cheek nod to Roman Polanski’s Knife in the Water (1962)—only instead of bickering over a woman, there is talk of fidelity to the party’s revolutionary cause. Apocrypha has it that two years later Slijepčević was slated to direct Jeanne Moreau in a film à clef about Alain Delon’s supposed ties to Corsican gangsters; for better or worse, the enterprise never came to fruition.

00:00 / 00:00
      Where to After the Rain? and I Miss Sonia Henie introduction by Nace Zavrl.

      PRECEDED BY

      • I Miss Sonia Henie (Nedostaje mi Sonja Henie)

        Directed by Karpo Godina, Miloš Forman, Buck Henry, Tinto Brass, Paul Morrissey, Frederick Wiseman, Bogdan Tirnanić, Puriša Đorđević, Dušan Makavejev. With Brooke Hayward, Branko Milićević, Catherine Rouvel.
        With Brooke Hayward, Branko Milićević, Catherine Rouvel.
        Yugoslavia, 1972, 35mm, color, 14 min.
        BCMS, English and French with English subtitles.
        Print source: HFA

      Prefacing Where to is an undisputed classic: a delirious nine-person omnibus orchestrated by the Slovene-Macedonian cineaste-in-chief Karpo Godina. “The 1972 Belgrade Film Festival,” writes Jurij Meden, “was the place to be. Godina assembled a motley crew of international and domestic festival guests. Every night after the official festival screenings and talks, they went to a tiny apartment with a 35mm camera fixed in a corner. Godina challenged each of his celebrated guests to create a short film, following a set of simple rules: one room, one camera position, no zooms, tilts or pans, a couple of minutes each. And in every short the words ‘I Miss Sonia Henie,’ a famous quote from the Snoopy cartoons, had to be voiced. The rest was left entirely to individual imaginations. The result: I Miss Sonja Henie, a conceptual masterpiece of absurdist black humor, seven distinctively different variations on a ludicrous theme, a cinephile’s wet dreams.”

      Part of film series

      Read more

      The Yugoslav Junction:
      Film and Internationalism in the SFRY, 1957 – 1988

      Current and upcoming film series

      Read more

      The Reincarnations of Delphine Seyrig

      Read more

      Ben Rivers, Back to the Land

      Read more

      Harvard Undergraduate Cinematheque

      Read more

      Make Way for Tomorrow. Carson Lund’s Eephus

      Read more

      Jessica Sarah Rinland’s Collective Monologue

      Read more

      David Lynch, New Dimensions

      Read more

      Museum Hours: Mati Diop’s Dahomey

      Read more

      Albert Serra, or Cinematic Time Regained

      Read more

      Wang Bing’s Youth Trilogy