Jelena Jovčić

Film author, curator and anthropologist

The Lost Innocence – script/treatment for documentary film.

I am documentary scriptwriter, director and editor. I am also curator and anthropologist. In the essence, the searcher for stories and storyteller, always seek the voices and stories of individuals, groups or communities that stayed silent and invisible.

Searching for the place of memory and past in the present moment is in the essence of my works. How we construct them in our mind and emotion? How we carry memory and past in the present? In my latest film “The Flood”, the topic was the collective memory of the inhabitants of the submerged town. In my earlier work “Day of Youth” it was ideologies and believes from the past that still divide people in the present Serbia. Now, my biggest challenge is to explore it not only in content, but also in methodology by using nonlinear film narrative; not common in documentary film.

“The Lost Innocence” is documentary that I’ve been filming in Romanian foster – family in a space of 11 years. The material that I made eleven years ago, describes the last moments that orphan Andrea spent in her foster family before she was taken by her grandparents. Later, it will turn out to be also the last days of her innocence childhood.

Andrea was transferred from her caring foster family to grandparents in 2007, when she was six. There she survived traumatic child exploitation. After two years of searching, her foster family found her in the bad condition and bring her back home.

The story will be placed in 2019, during the events that follow celebration of Andrea’s 18th birthday and the day when she legally needs to leave her foster family. That is the moment when memories starts to come out on the surface again. Interweaving past and present, film will explore memories and transfer experience of Andrea.

My aim is to intertwine past and present from material that are made in such long period (different technique, I was different as an author, characters changed etc). Analyzing the material from previous filming, I want to explore it as places of memory in the final story.

In documentary film world, no one gives you a time and space to experiment, to dream your film, to be inspired and to cross the bounders of the already known. Everything revolves around the industry and production. The Saari Residence gives that space. During my stay at the Saari Residence, I will research and reinterpreted filmed footage from 2007, explore non linear narrative and applied it in a script/treatment for documentary film.