A true-story medical-historical thriller that cleverly borrows from the cinematic grammar of police procedurals and body horror films, Another Spring is the latest lightly experimental found-footage documentary from Serbian director Mladen Kovacevic. Forensically chronicling the last ever smallpox outbreak in Europe, which stuck the former Yugoslavia 50 years ago, this insider account of a lethal epidemic invites some very timely parallels with the current pandemic. Indeed, this entire project was born from Covid restrictions after Kovacevic was forced to postpone a planned international project due to ongoing travel complications.
The subject matter may sound dry and the treatment austere, but Another Spring proves to be a quietly mesmerising piece of non-fiction storytelling that plays artful games with time and memory, music and sound design. Older Balkan-region viewers will likely already be familiar with these events, especially as Yugoslav director Goran Markovic already dramatised them into a bizarre socialist-horror film, Variola Vera (1982). But this surprisingly topical, tense, atmospheric exercise in video archeology should also strike a chord with a wider global audiences. It screens in the documentary competition section in Sarajevo this week, Kovacevic’s fifth entry in the Bosnian film showcase so far. The director’s prize-winning track record at Karlovy Vary, Rotterdam, Visions du Réel, IDFA, Hot Docs and more should boost his new film’s prospects.
Another Spring is narrated by a single voice, Doctor Zoran Radovanovic. A key figure in fighting the smallpox outbreak as a young epidemiologist back in 1972, Radovanovic later wrote a book about it. His cool, spare, world-wear narration tracks how the disease was imported into the former Yugoslavia in February 1972 by a Kosovar Albanian Muslim, Ibrahim Hoti, who had likely picked it up in Iraq as he returned from a Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina. Since the region’s last known case of smallpox had occurred 40 years earlier, doctors were initially slow to identify the virus. But once it was official, the state apparatus kicked into high gear with martial law declared, social gatherings banned, army roadblocks, enforced quarantine and a mandatory mass vaccination programme that inoculated 18 million citizen by May. As a result, only 175 people caught the disease, leading to a tragic but fairly modest death rate of 35.
Another Spring is assembled entirely from archive footage, most of it related to the 1972 outbreak, but with some general period background and more lyrical visuals, abract but somehow resonant to the topic. Most of the clips are drawn from the video vaults of Radio Television Serbia (RTS), who inherited the archive from Belgrade’s former Communist-era state broadcaster, which explains their credit as a production partner on this film. Kovacevic also draws from other sources including the archives of Kosovo news stations and Zastava Film, the Yugoslavian army’s film unit.
The majority of this footage is in scratchy monochrome, but there are sporadic detours into attractively grainy, washed-out colour that feel like animated versions of colourised antique postcards. Sparingly used close-up shots of real smallpox patients, their skin carpeted with weeping sores and pus-filled blisters, are more nightmarish than most horror movies. In an inspired touch, Kovacevic slows almost every clip down to around a third of its real speed, a stylistic device intended to suggest hazy memory and creeping unease. This approach has echoes of British director Adam Curtis (Bitter Lake, Hypernormalisation), who assembles his dreamlike essay-film montages using the vast BBC archives. Like Curtis, Koracevic also uses music to potent effect. Sound designer Jakov Munižaba’s first ever film score is a droning, disquieting moodcsape composed on an antique EMS synthesizer that sits comfortably within this documentary’s crackly analogue aesthetic.
Parallels between the smallpox epidemic of 50 years ago and our current Covid pandemic are plain to see in Another Spring: enforced curfews, banned gatherings, medical staff getting sick after working without personal protection equipment, a huge mass vaccination programme, and so on. These echoes are clearly part of Kovacevic’s overall concept for the film, but he ever labours the point. The unified global effort sparked by this outbreak grew into a worldwide vaccine drive that officially wiped out smallpox by 1980, the first ever human disease to be fully eradicated. In his gloomy Sarajevo interviews, the director has claimed that such heroic multinational co-operation would no longer be possible today.
Director, screenwriter: Mladen Kovacevic
Narrator: Zoran Radovanovic
Editing: Jelena Maksimovic
Music, sound design: Jakov Munižaba
Colourist: Marko Milovanovic
Producers: Iva Plemic Divjak, Mladen Kovacevic
Production companies: Filmska produkcija Horopter (Serbia), Bocalupo Films (France), Cinnamon Film (Serbia), RTS (Serbia)
World sales: Taskovski Films, London
Venue: Sarajevo Film Festival (Documentary Competition)
In Serbian, Albanian, Croatian, Slovenian, Bosnian, English, French
90 minutes
