Complexities of Resistance: Partisan Films from Eastern Europe and the Balkans Film Series presents a film screening of THE VALLEY OF PEACE (Dolina miru)
Yugoslavia (Slovenia), 1956. 89 minutes.
Directed by France Štiglic. DCP. Slovenian Film Archive, Ljubljana.
on Saturday, September 30, 2023, 7:00 p.m.
Humanities Quadrangle, Screening Room L01
320 York Street, New Haven, CT 06511
Free and open to the public | All films will be shown with English subtitles
Marko and Lotti, orphaned by the war and lost in Slovenia, attempt to find THE VALLEY OF PEACE. The downed African American pilot Jim (played by John Kitzmiller, who won the Palme d’Or at Cannes for the role) takes them under his wing, with both the Nazi enemy and the Yugoslav partisans in hot pursuit. The best-loved of the prolific Štiglic’s many works, THE VALLEY OF PEACE fashions an onscreen multi-ethnic united front on behalf of peace and against fascism.
Sponsors:
Edward J. and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Memorial Fund; Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies Program; European Studies Council; Whitney Humanities Center; Yale Film Archive; Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures; and Film and Media Studies Program
About the Film Series: In the aftermath of World War II, several European states started reconstructing and reimagining their identities and recent histories by producing a vast number of films that celebrated and commemorated their guerrilla struggles against fascism. These films ranged in scope and ambition from intimate psychological dramas to overblown military spectacles, from elegiac recollections to pure pulp fiction. Similar to Hollywood westerns, partisan films were the defining genre of the socialist film industry for a significant period. Moreover, in the late 60s and early 70s, both genres reinvented themselves and underwent a political revision that ended their respective “classical periods.” Despite being hugely successful in their domestic markets and often cinematically accomplished, many examples of the partisan films never traveled abroad, and most film prints today remain locked up and in dire need of preservation in various national film archives. Aside from a handful of canonical works, the majority of films we will screen have never been shown in the U.S.