166: Mina Radovic

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, Pretty Flame (Srdjan Dragojevic, 1996) – a war and anti-war film at the same time – in shaping him.
We talk about the latest Sight and Sound poll of greatest ever films and the role of impact in academia, and we find out about the time Mina met Martin Scorsese.
We learn about Mina’s time in St. Andrews where as an undergraduate he studied Film Studies and German and about how he grew up going to the cinema. We talk about how one cannot be nostalgic about war itself and discuss whether we can be nostalgic for the future.
Then, towards the end of the interview, we find out what Mina’s younger self thought he would end up doing – and how as far back as primary school he thought he would end up studying film.