Mila Turajlic is a documentary filmmaker from Belgrade, Serbia. Her 2010 directorial debut, “Cinema Komunisto,” premiered at the International Documentary Filmfestival Amsterdam and the Tribeca Film Festival. She is an alumna of Eurodoc, Berlin Talent Campus, and Discovery Campus, and teaches at Archidoc and the Balkan Documentary Center. Turajlic has produced the Magnificent 7 Festival of European Documentary Films in Belgrade since 2005, and was the first president of DokSerbia, the association of Serbian documentary filmmakers she co-founded.

“The Other Side of Everything” will premiere at the 2017 Toronto International Film Festival on September 12.

W&H: Describe the film for us in your own words.

MT: This is a story about my family home, which has an unusual element to it — there is a door in our living room that has been locked for 70 years. Using this unique setting as the starting point for a family chronicle, I explore the way politics has shaped the lives of people over three generations, building the film around a dialogue with my mother, who played an active role in the resistance movement during the 1990s and in the first democratic government after the revolution that took place in Serbia in 2000.

W&H: What drew you to this story?

MT: This is one of those films that you end up having to make as you grow older and realize that the place you live in offers a unique viewpoint from which to observe events that have defined the lives of my generation. I felt that the story of what we had lived through during the breakup of Yugoslavia, during Milošević, and in the years since our democratic revolution, had never been told by the media in a way that I recognize or in which I see my own lived experience of those years.

As time goes by and a generation comes of age that doesn’t remember the war years, I felt it was essential to reclaim that narrative.

W&H: What do you want people to think about when they are leaving the theater?

MT: In many ways I see this as a film about generations, transmission, and heritage — the passing on of a legacy of engagement and responsibility for one’s society and community. Towards the end of the film my mother asks me to dig inside myself and find the answer to whether I have it in me to speak up and take action about the things I see going wrong in our country. I like to think that people leaving the theater will be confronted with that question.

W&H: What was the biggest challenge in making the film?

MT: It is definitely a huge challenge to make a film about one’s own family, and use one’s family story as a prism through which to observe history. From filming daily events and winning the confidence of neighbors and family friends about facing a camera every time they enter our home, to being always ready to film because any phone call or visit has the potential start to a new scene, to the edit which required a fine balancing of the personal and political.

W&H: How did you get your film funded? Share some insights into how you got the film made.

MT: The film is a co-production between my own production company in Serbia — this is the case for most documentary filmmakers in my country, that we have to act as our own producers — and the French company Survivance and HBO Europe. I was lucky to find the right collaborators. Carine Chichkowsky of Survivance took on producing the film and Hanka Kastelicova from HBO Europe came on board from the very start. They both fell in love with the project, and really helped me carry the psychological and artistic weight of making it.

With Carine, who I met through the Eurodoc training program, we built the financing plan around film funds, winning funding from both our national funds (Serbian Film Center in Serbia and Cinéma du monde in France) and then getting support from Eurimages and the Doha Film Institute. Sabine Rollberg from WDR/Arte also came on board fairly early on, and as well as with HBO Europe, we were fortunate in that the slots they took the film for are really cinema slots for auteur documentaries, which meant we were all on the same page creatively.

W&H: What does it mean for you to have your film play at the Toronto International Film Festival?

MT: It’s a huge privilege to have the film be in the line-up with such prestigious documentaries. For me there is also a curiosity, as it means our world premiere will be before a North American audience, and we are bringing them a story that is far from their own world. At the same time it is exciting to discover how the parallels will speak to them, because the question of the attack on democracy and the threat of instability and war seems to be hanging over most of the world right now.

W&H: What’s the best and worst advice you’ve received?

MT: It’s not really advice, but it was an observation Carine made, that a director is someone who gets their film made no matter what. I come back to this a lot in discussions with colleagues over talent, financing, and other obstacles, that ultimately it has been about that level of drive to get your film made and tell your story.

Worst advice comes from film school, where directors tend to be told that they need to concern themselves with their creative vision and that someone else will worry about the production side of things. I feel like few directors have the luxury to not be invested in how their film will be financed and what kind of artistic constraints that financing entails, or to understand all the complexities of the changing distribution landscape.

W&H: What advice do you have for other female directors?

MT: I know being a female director sometimes might mean a greater struggle to assert oneself, but my strategy has actually sometimes been the opposite of that. I find that I manage to go furthest when I have no problem with letting people underestimate me and, crucially, letting them decide that I am slightly crazy — that’s when they tend to get out of my way and let me do what I want.

W&H: Name your favorite woman-directed film and why.

MT: It has to be Agnès Varda’s “The Gleaners & I” because it is the film that made me realize that documentary filmmaking was the language through which I wanted to engage with the world. For me “The Gleaners & I” is a kind of meta-documentary about the essential nature of documentary filmmaking — gleaning food from what others consider garbage, finding treasure where others see junk, allowing intuition to lead you on a road trip of encounters, using your camera to give people the space to express their worlds.

W&H: There have been significant conversations over the last couple of years about increasing the amount of opportunities for women directors yet the numbers have not increased. Are you optimistic about the possibilities for change? Share any thoughts you might have on this topic.

MT: We were joking recently with our composer that he is an endangered minority, because on this film he was the only male — the producer, our executive producers, myself as director, the editor, and the main character in the film are all women!

However, generally speaking, I come from a former communist country where gender politics were less of an issue at the time of my birth because women had nominally been given an equal role as agents of revolution. I didn’t grow up with a strong feeling of there being a gender divide in my world — we were brought up on class struggle. As the tools of filmmaking become more democratized, I am very optimistic about our chances to shift the power balance.