WE REGRET THAT THIS EVENT HAS BEEN CANCELED.
Please join the Harriman Institute and the Bosnian-Herzegovinian Film Festival (BHFF) for a screening of the 2017 film Men Don't Cry (Muskarci ne plaču). The screening will be followed by a discussion with the film's director Alen Drljević, film scholar Dijana Jelača, and Columbia professor Tanya Domi. Bosnian language with English subtitles. Film runtime: 98 minutes.
Twenty years after the conclusion of the Bosnian War, a group of men meet to discuss their experiences and process the events that shaped their lives decades ago. Comprised of a diverse group ethnic backgrounds, including Bosnian, Croat, and Serbian descent, the men alternate between confronting and avoiding painful memories through a mix of therapy sessions and drunken revelry. Set at a remote mountain hotel, the film features cinematography that straddles the aesthetic line between documentary and narrative film, often leaving the viewer with a sense of unease. Men Don’t Cry embraces moral uncertainty and the effects of time on painful memories as it explores themes of ethnic conflict and the impact, both physical and emotional, that war leaves on its participants. The film also delves into gender issues with its exploration of the role played by masculinity in shaping war and the way veterans deal with their past experiences. Tense and unsettling, Men Don’t Cry casts doubt on the value and possibility of the emotional catharsis sought by its protagonists.
Alen Drljević makes his feature directorial debut with Men Don’t Cry. A graduate of the Academy of Performing Arts in Sarajevo, Alen’s 2005 short film The Paycheck was nominated for a European Film Award for Best Short. His 2006 documentary Carnival explored the effects of the conflicts of the 1990s on the former Yugoslav states. After working as an assistant director on three films with director Jasmila Žbanić, Alen embarked on his own career as a feature director with the critically-acclaimed Men Don’t Cry.
Dijana Jelača is a film scholar whose most recent publication is a co-authored book Film Feminisms: A Global Introduction (Routledge, 2019, with Kristin Lené Hole). She is also the author of Dislocated Screen Memory: Narrating Trauma in Post-Yugoslav Cinema (Palgrave 2016), and co-editor of The Routledge Companion to Cinema and Gender (Routledge, 2017), The Cultural Life of Capitalism in Yugoslavia (Palgrave, 2017), and The Future of (Post)Socialism (2018). Her essays have appeared in Camera Obscura, Signs, Feminist Media Studies, Jump Cut and elsewhere. She teaches in the Film Department at Brooklyn College, and is a programming co-director of the Bosnian-Herzegovinian Film Festival.
Tanya Domi is an Adjunct Assistant Professor of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs and is an affiliate faculty member of the Harriman Institute. She teaches the class “Human Rights in the Western Balkans” and is also a Lecturer at Hunter College, CUNY and the Roosevelt House, where she teaches “Contemporary Global LGBTQ Human Rights.” Before her faculty appointments, she worked in Bosnia and Herzegovina implementing the Dayton Peace Accords for the OSCE Mission 1996-2000 where she served as Spokesperson 1999-2000. Tanya serves as the Advisory Board President of Post-Conflict Research Center, based in Sarajevo.
The Bosnian-Herzegovinian Film Festival (BHFF) is an exciting showcase for contemporary Bosnian-Herzegovinian cinematography, and films with Bosnia and Herzegovina as their theme. Each year, BHFF brings a colorful tableau of Bosnian and Herzegovinian stories to diverse New York City audiences. Over the years it has grown from a simple film revue event to a New York City institution; its audience includes people with Bosnian heritage, people from other Balkan expatriate communities, as well as a wide cross-section of all New Yorkers who cherish international and independent film productions.
