Sanja Anđelković

Selected for AFI '25 by Cultural Centre of Belgrade, Serbia.

What compels you to work with moving image, and when did you first become interested in the medium?
Honestly, three things: climate change, overcrowding of objects, recourses. To elaborate more on the three things: I guess the first two things go hand in hand… so climate change and over-crowdedness drive my work in the direction of not only questioning the material but modes of production and everything else behind it. I am aware that electricity comes as a cost too, but am working on realizing how to minimize my impact by not minimizing my ambition of a good quality aestheticly affective work. -so to be continued on that matter. As far as resources go, it also came to ambition and expression that needed more that just a 2D realization, therefor, the cheapest option for me to realize my works direction is to learn 3D animation and create worlds that at the time I didn’t have the privilege to, for instance, create in a theatre. My work is therefor questioning the medium it is presented in but also exploring the potentiality to evoke emotions and in a sense “fake” states.

Can you speak about the potential that dreaming and altered states of reality offer individuals and societies? How do you feel this is reflected in filmmaking and in your artwork specifically?
As I work in speculative realms of art, I feel like the whole fabulative potentials, be it real or not, or produced in a wake or non wake state is highly appealing. Altered states of reality for sure give a new space, new ideas, new outlook and a new vision above all.

Please share a list of books, music, films, artworks, thinkers, spaces and places that inspire your practice, and in particular have fed into your thinking around this film.
The main reference would be: Insect Singers, a Natural History of the Cicadas by J. G. Myers, and then others like Hell: In Search of a Christian Ecology by Thimothy Morton and so on…

What new projects or lines of research are currently preoccupying you?
Currently my PhD in Artistic research and expansion of the ideas on religion and its de-construction through a multispecies narratives and fabulation. Non-human languages and deconstruction of human knowledge through the ancestral non-human knowledge. The possibilities to think through “altered” states that for me represent the transdisciplinarity and its potential in thinking through already established forms.