Nostalgia Interviews With Chris Deacy

My guest this week is Mina Radovic, archivist, curator, film historian and founder of the international charitable organization Liberating Cinema. I met Mina at the Spaces of Memory conference he helped to organize at the University of Vienna in March 2023. Mina is also a PhD student at Goldsmiths, University of London, on German linguistics and film studies, studying the framing of totalitarian language and film in 1930s Germany. We learn how the films from that era included musicals and comedies which are not the ones we might expect to hear about, though some of the films are still banned. We find out about the antecedents to this project including the ‘worldbuilding’ cinema of Douglas Sirk, and about Mina’s masterclasses during lockdown as part of Liberating Cinema. Mina reveals who has been part of his series, including filmmakers from the Czech Republic and the former Yugoslavia. Born in Belgrade, Mina grew up during the civil war in the former Yugoslavia and he talks about the role of Pretty Village