Druga strana svega

Just paying my respect to the director of the such a human work that today we see a few like this.

We as a Iranian especially aren't stranger to this situations. Our parents tell us about revolution and the war after that.

Hope that after about four years more people see this valuable documentary.

"Your generation need to find their way"

Thanks you mila Greetings from Iran.

War is never something ... at least for me it is something that I do not fully understand. But what does it do with individuals that are really affected by it? You have things to look back to, family members that are lost, things left behind, be it in locked rooms or in your head.

A not really easy watch, but well handled look at the balkan war (I think that is what it's called) - a personalized look into it, with quite the flavor. If you like documentaries about interesting people and their stories, this one is for you. And very well made too.

By the time I checked, there were two reviews of this title: One giving it a 1/10, criticising the use of "fictitious" or "distorted" facts in the film; the other giving it a 10/10 for the "realistic" approach. As a non-expert I will not be commenting the political content of this film, may others do it, scholars or eye witnesses. Yet it is an amazing documentary, weaving personal and historical content together into a strong storyline that is accesible at all times and moving in ways you did not expect. The director manages to tell the meta-story of Serbia while linking it to the micro-story of her mother, a way of story telling which is beautiful to watch but hard to pull of.

This documentary gives us a nice overview of Yugoslavia history, mixed with the personal story of a family and its appartment - with a main focus on Srbijanka Turajlic, a human rights and freedom activist that was involved in lot of serbian historical moments.

On top of that - and that is in my opinion the top objective of this movie - it makes you think on how we, you, I would have act - or not. A question that the director of the documentary, Srbijanka's daughter, is forced to face with the come back of nationalism of Serbia. But a question, we all have to face in our times, and answers are not easy ones.

The Other Side of Everything is a complex documentary about the last 100 years of the history of Yugoslavia (and later Serbia). But this is not your typical documentary. There are three intertwined stories in the movie. The first is about the Turajlic family - mainly about the movie director Mila Turajlic and her mother, Slobodanka, a university professor and political dissident. It tells the story of a family of intellectuals whose downfall started with the communist regime but was accelerated with the rise of Milosevic and later Vucic. The second storyline is about their apartment, which was split and partially seized by the communists. The family lives in their half of the original apartment, which is a testament to the history of both the family and the country. Finally, the third storyline shows historical moments that shaped the country, with an emphasis on the rise and fall of Milosevic's regime.

This is a brilliant documentary, and Mila Turajlic proves that she has a remarkable talent for telling a complex history of a country from a unique and complex perspective. This movie follows the turbulent history of Yugoslavia and Serbia and how it affected one family. It is a movie that anyone in Serbia could identify with, as everyone went through those struggles, and everyone at some point had similar thoughts of whether staying and living in Serbia was worth it or whether they should emigrate and never look back.