Meeting with
Karpo Godina

Karpo Godina, protagonist of the complete retrospective at BFM 37, will meet the audience at the Bookshop in Piazza della Libertà.

One of the absolutely central figures of three decades of Yugoslavian cinema (plus consequently, and up until today, three decades of Slovenian cinema), Karpo Godina was always hard, if not impossible, to pinpoint and define. Director, director of photography, cinematographer, writer, editor. Half-Slovenian, half-Macedonian, but most comfortable at work in former Yugoslavia’s Republics of Serbia and Bosnia & Herzegovina. Author of numerous both features and shorts, equaly fluent in various documentary, fiction and avantgarde languages. One of the key personalities and contributors to the Yugoslavian New Wave, notoriously known also as Black Wave, and a frequent & essential collaborator of such luminaries as Želimir Žilnik and Lordan Zafranović. Also an inspiring teacher, master photographer, political activist. If there’s an underlining element to Godina’s vast filmography as a director, aside from the obvious fact that most of his films are visually breathtaking, it is an all-permeating sense of playfullness and joy, a continuous display of an unhinged freedom of expression, squarely targeted against all shapes and forms of repression. In Slovenia he was a collaborator of Filip Robar Dorin, who was also a very special figure of that time, founder of one of  the first independent film production companies in Yugoslavia, Filmske alternative and as director dealing with problematic social themes and never hide his point of view.
In 2013, the footage Godina filmed around villages of Vojvodina after shooting Early Works but never completed into a motion picture, was made into an acclaimed documentary titled Karpotrotter, directed by Slovenian film-maker Matjaz Ivanišin. This film will be also shown as part of the Bergamo retrospective.
In 2016, Karpo Godina was awarded the Underground Spirit prize at the European Film Festival Palić, in Serbia, a recognition assigned for exceptional work in the field of independent film and unique poetics developed off the film industry mainstream. On this occasion, he said: «All my films have certain message and the only important thing for me was to catch a spirit of time. I have always tried to find a new language or a form to implement into film».
In October 2018 Karpo Godina present at MOMA his first career retrospective in the US, coinciding with the exhibition Toward a Concrete Utopia: Architecture in Yugoslavia, 1948–1980.