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Noble Ambition : Three Early Shorts by

Ivana Mladenović

Essay on Ivana Mladenović’s shorts
Screened during FIELD RECORDINGS 6
Author nick thomas
copy editor harriet foyster
Published July 5, 2026



still from soldiers. story from ferentari (2017)

download a pdf here
Forty-one corns and forty-one brothers,
All dressed in one shirt!
The way you know how to spread,
Tell me what’s in Ivana’s head!


It can be painful looking back at your early works, seeing in embryonic form what will later become more articulate and confident, but which now feels clumsy, even embarrassing. In the case of Ivana Mladenović, she is downright dismissive; she had no idea what she was doing, or so she claims in a Q&A after the screening of her own early works. She is talking about three short nonfiction films, namely In the Village (2009), Biology Class (2016), and Leaves of Grass (2016), which I am watching as part of Field Recordings festival in Rotterdam, and which form a rarely screened part of her filmography. Soon after Leaves of Grass, Mladenović finished Soldiers. Story from Ferentari (2017), her first feature fiction (also screened at Field Recordings), which marks an inflection point in her work, leaving documentary behind while continuing to work with people on the periphery of society and employing non-professional actors. Although Soldiers and her subsequent features have garnered more attention, we can see in these earlier shorts the seeds of what makes her work compelling: a rude energy, genuine empathy for marginalised people, a willingness to expose herself, and a knack for evoking the textures and dynamics of particular places.



Still from soldiers. story from ferentari (2017)
Like Agnes Varda’s Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962), In the Village begins with a fortune telling, though in this case the future is read not in Tarot cards but in pieces of corn. While holding the camera, Ivana is told she will go on a trip with a man, and we cut to a car interior; a pair of quizzical eyes framed by dark eyebrows and white hair looks back at us in the rearview mirror. The opening title appears and, to a score of vibraphone muzak, we’re in the eponymous village, or more specifically at the water’s edge, where the village meets the river. Kladovo is on the Serbian side of the Danube, across from the Romanian city of Severin. Later in the film someone compares it to Buda and Pest, just without the bridges, though the left bank has been a distant relative since Tito and Ceaușescu inaugurated the Iron Gate dam in 1972, widening the waterway. Fifty metres from shore, a teenager paddles his canoe. Through a montage we quickly grasp the feeling of this space: a swimmer splashes next to a parked passenger ferry; the man from the car reappears in swimwear, bathed in golden-hour light; someone rides a BMX around at night. It’s summer and life happens outdoors, on the concrete promenade.

‘I’m the saddest man in the world,’ Ivana’s father tells us, ‘because I never thought my daughter is going to leave me, my only girl, gone into a black and white world.’ It’s a classic scenario, the pain of a child leaving home, and the melodrama is typical of Mladenović’s work. We see fragments of Bucharest, where Ivana lives, intercut with her father’s speculations about what her life is like there. He has the usual dad worries, bemoaning Ivana’s choice of occupation; she could have been a famous attorney, or a veterinarian. Ultimately however, it is she who managed to enrol her father in her career, convincing him to play himself again in her autobiographical feature Ivana the Terrible (2019) and, later, in Sorella di Clausura (2025), the character of Boban, a famous musician with whom the protagonist is obsessed. He is already a magnetic presence in In the Village, sad and stoic, playing his role perfectly. 

Ivana interviews her family members (her brother and sister also make an appearance) about her choices to leave Kladovo. They refer to her in the third person, as though she were not there, but rather someone they once knew, living a distant and mysterious life. The artistic tendency to make self-portraits is common, but it feels particularly important for a director who gets so close to her protagonists to understand the heat of the camera’s lens, and what it means to be vulnerable. In Soldiers, she rehearsed for a year with non-professional actors, some of whom play themselves, and the result is a bevy of mesmeric performances. In contrast, her subsequent film Ivana the Terrible is all about Ivana, who enacts herself as a paranoid hypochondriac whose hair has fallen out in the wake of a traumatic filmmaking experience. Mladenović says she was criticised for being narcissistic, but also that she never expected the film to be distributed, and that her family only agreed to participate because they thought it would be therapeutic for her. It’s a typically self-deprecating statement which masks a talent for marshalling people to her cause, figuring out what makes them tick, and pushing them out of their comfort zone; a quality which is mitigated by the fact that she seems to be as demanding of herself as she is of anyone else. As writer and researcher Lili Owen Rowlands notes of Agnes Varda, ‘For [her], the “talent of the documentarist” was “to be forgotten” – a noble ambition, but one she regularly ignored.’



Still From ivana the terrible (2019)
In the second film of the programme, Leaves of Grass, we begin in an empty, institutional corridor, dominated by the oppressive buzz of fluorescent lighting. A youth emerges with a union flag towel wrapped around his waist, followed by three more, who whip each other playfully with theirs. We are in a very male space, which we later recognise as a boxing gym; weights piled up on an old parquet floor, long mirrors like those you would find in a dance studio, and punchbags hanging from the ceiling. As we transition from the corridor, a sentence appears in a bold, italic, sans-serif typeface:

NOW I TELL WHAT I KNEW IN TEXAS
IN MY EARLY YOUTH

We are not in Texas of course, but the outskirts of Bucharest. Walt Whitman’s poem Song of Myself accompanies us throughout, producing a parallel timeline told in free verse. While slightly awkward in its implementation as text-on-screen, Song of Myself, in its scale and multiplicity, opens up the film to many layers of meaning, not least the relationship between male body cultures and nationalism. The reference to a massacre of ‘four hundred and twelve young men’ in one of the battles of the Mexican–American War emphasises the fragility of our group of young boxers, some of whom Mladenović knew through the making of a previous film, which followed them as they emerged from time in prison and readjusted to life in their Roma community. How has the Romanian nation, three decades after the downfall of Ceaușescu, treated those on its periphery? There is a reflection of Whitman’s democratic outlook in Mladenović’s work, his attention to the marginalised subjects of the emerging American nation echoed in her interest in outsiders, alcoholics, criminals, and obsessives. Song of Myself was published a few years before the outbreak of civil war, and with the help of hindsight we can see a riven society. Romania’s political future—and the fate of our young boxers, playfully flexing their biceps for each other—is uncertain.


Still from leaves of grass (2016)

Of the films in this programme, I find Biology Class the most enigmatic. Commissioned by an NGO and shot in one day, it follows children and teenagers in a school for students with visual impairments. The opening sequence is contained within the walls of the school’s playground, which the students explore haptically by banging and kicking a ball against them. As with the fluorescent hum in Leaves of Grass, sound plays an important role in defining the space. The film progresses through a typical day at the school, with several long, draining sequences of students learning how to navigate corridors and stairs, under the watchful eyes of their teachers. The sheer amount of time required to make something familiar, and therefore safe, is palpable, and we feel the discomfort of observing someone who cannot look back at the camera, the inherent power dynamic of the cinematic gaze amplified and accentuated. With some relief, we move on to the titular biology class, where the students learn about animals by handling models and taxidermic specimens, and finally to a field trip (it is the last day of school) to a sea-life centre with dolphins performing tricks. In this predominantly visual spectacle, a strange choice of activity, we see a glimpse of Mladenović’s attentiveness to dysfunction. While Biology Class lacks the depth of engagement of some of Mladenović’s other works, it still foregrounds people making use of the collective agency they have, in the face of a system that can be indifferent and absurd.

Perhaps it is a relationship between intimate subjectivity, place, and historical forces that most characterises Mladenović’s work. The portrait of the river-border in In the Village and Ivana the Terrible plays on the political role of the threshold between Serbia and Romania. As researcher Madalina Meirosu points out in an essay on Ivana the Terrible, ‘The tables have turned on the two sides of the river: [Kladovo] once symbolized opportunity for the Romanian people during the totalitarian regime, providing access to otherwise unattainable goods,’ but, as one character remarks, ‘It is now Romania’s turn, as Serbia’s historical friend, to contribute to the reinvigoration of Kladovo.’ Made just after Romania’s 2007 accession to the EU, In the Village is an attempt by Mladenović to reckon with her personal transition, and the deeper anxieties it evokes in her family as residents of a border town.

Mladenović’s work has some points of commonality with the so-called Romanian New Wave—working class humour, a preoccupation with the specific dysfunction of post-communist society, contempt for bourgeois social mores—and as an actress she has appeared in Radu Jude’s Scarred Hearts, among other films. She is stylistically distinct though, a Serbian-Romanian insider-outsider figure, and a woman, of whom there are not many associated with the Romanian New Wave label. She cites the Serbian Black Wave as a greater influence. Few of the major figures of Romanian cinema have put themselves in the vulnerable position of being in front of the camera, transiting back and forth between what Varda (another woman associated with a largely male ‘new wave’) described as ‘the looking subject’ and ‘the looked-at subject’ in reference to the character of Cléo. Bad reviews of Ivana the Terrible (of which there were some when it was released) misunderstood why this might be interesting; that self-portrayal is not simply narcissism, and its purpose not to present the author as a likeable or morally correct character. Indeed, I suspect that some of Mladenović’s power as a director comes from not needing to be liked.

Both Soldiers and her third fiction feature, Sorella di Clausura, are drawn from autobiographical books, by Adrian Schiop and Liliana Pelici respectively. While I initially felt that there was less at stake in Ivana the Terrible than in Soldiers, the former is important within the context of the rest of her work, as a cinematic autofiction or autotheory. Throughout her films she situates herself in a history which ranges in scale from the breakup of Yugoslavia to the contemporary life of a specific Bucharest neighbourhood. What kind of subjects emerge from this tangle? While many of her early works are concerned with the masculinity of boxers and convicts, by examining her own life (and Pelici’s), Mladenović draws out a wilful, self-destructive, and sometimes obsessive female subjectivity. It is an examination of the societal dysfunction of her home countries—the grafting of post-transition consumerism and popular culture onto the remnants of a conservative communist bureaucracy—seen through the eyes of Mladenović and her fellow citizens. In her seminal work of autofiction I Love Dick (1997), Kris Kraus asks, ‘Why does everybody think that women are debasing themselves when we expose the conditions of our own debasement?’ By putting herself at the centre of the storm, Mladenović lays bare the conditions of contemporary Serbian and Romanian life, and through a somewhat unflattering self-portrait, pulls us closer into this unstable territory. 

If there is a question mark over Mladenović’s work, it is not about narcissism, but the difficulties of working with vulnerable people. Owen Rowlands notes of Varda that:      

[…] she worried, intermittently, about the ethics of working so closely with real life – whether the documentary method was comparable to hunting, or ‘a form of rape’. At other times she was defensive, retreating into the alibi that everything she made was a fiction.

It is a sentiment that could apply to Mladenović. I feel, when watching her films, that her protagonists trust her, though it is hard to say why; she surely pushes those around her to their limits, and occasionally beyond. There is an early documentary that she almost disowns: she was too young, and didn’t know how to do things properly, she says. When I ask her at the festival about her relationship with Ferentari (the area where Soldiers was shot), she tells me about her time working on a needle-exchange programme, hinting at a social conscience that she rarely leans on when talking about the films. In her best work there is an undoubted sincerity, even if it’s hidden beneath irony, and we see its roots somewhere between the self-exposing depiction of Kladovo and the empathetic protagonists in Leaves of Grass and Biology Class. After some difficult, even traumatic experiences, Mladenović gave up on making documentaries but, like Varda, one could imagine her returning to the form. And though she might dismiss these early films as incomplete, for the rest of us they are an insight into a complex body of work, and unpolished but captivating vignettes in their own right.





 References

1  Lili Owen Rowlands, ‘Againstness’,
London Review of Books(italics), 48/10 (June 2026)
2  Madalina Meirosu, 'Fragmentary Time and Personal Crisis in Ivana Mladenovic’s Ivana the Terrible', University of Bucharest Review Literary and Cultural Studies Series(italics), 14/2 (2024): 42–51.
3  Kris Kraus, I Love Dick (italics), Semiotext(e), 1998