Iva Radivojević on Her Forced Migration Feature ‘When the Phone Rang’

On a Friday at 10:36 a.m. in 1992, 11-year-old Lana picks up a phone call whose effects reverberate through her life. So goes the hypnotic refrain that loops through Iva Radivojević‘s second narrative feature, “When the Phone Rang“ (2024), presented in the Locarno Film Festival‘s Concorso Cineasti del Presente section. 

And a self-hypnosis it is; the call marks a double trauma for Lana as she simultaneously loses her grandfather and country. Thrust into an extended state of dislocation, Lana experiences a fragmentation of her memories and history. To counter the effects of migration, she obsessively loops back to the phone call to hold fast to what she knows to be true — at a point when she must quickly grow accustomed to her national identity and home being confronted and renegotiated. 

The result is a film that is equal parts travelogue and reconstruction of a memory, one that refuses exceptionalism in favor of an amorphous form that seeks to commune across geographical boundaries. While Radivojević doesn’t hide the fact that the dissolved country is Yugoslavia, the “country that no longer exists” remains unnamed in the film. She explains, “This kind of displacement is happening everywhere in different iterations, as in Ukraine, Palestine and Sudan. I wanted it to be universal and relate to any moment in time.”

Born in Serbia and currently based in Lesbos, Greece, Radivojević’s prolific output of short films, documentaries, and one feature-length narrative – “Aleph” (2021) – have long centered on themes of dislocation, fluidity in national identity, and itinerancy. While her sophomore feature continues to encompass such concerns, “When the Phone Rang” is the director’s first attempt at excavating her own history at a time when she’s found a place she desires to return to. 

“After leaving Yugoslavia, I grew up in Cyprus. Then, I lived in the U.S. for a long time before returning to Greece. Something about returning to the culture I grew up in triggered something. You get so busy surviving that you don’t have the time to address your trauma, and at some point, it comes up and wants to talk to you. It felt like the right moment for it, especially with the mass dislocation happening all over the world.”

To do so, Radivojević returned to Serbia and assembled an eight-person crew where everyone took on multiple roles in production – Radivojević herself doubled up as her own art director since, as she put it, “big sets make me nervous.” Owing to budgetary constraints, she lived in the same apartment in which they shot the film, with some discomfort, “I probably would’ve liked the separation [of film and life], but maybe it was needed for me to be there,” she says.    

Then she gathered her old friends, neighbors, and family photographs to bring to life a portrait of a child and her neighborhood, repopulated by a familiar cast of characters that Radivojević once had and lost. “It’s about imprinting them in time and space and memory. Otherwise, they could be forgotten or cease to exist. I want them to exist.” In one euphoric capsule, Radivojević had gathered all that she yearned from her past within reach. 

Radivojević has long employed voiceover as a device in her work. Reflecting the state of migrants, the disembodied voice “shapeshifts” across boundaries, trying to find a home to return to. She notes, “When migrants move, they change languages and identities. Shapeshifting is the nature of migrants.”

In that vein, Radivojević describes the voice as a ghost that haunts the images, a reminder of the loss of clarity in pictorial memory. As the narrator’s voice modulates in cadence and tone to reflect an “experiential inner and outer experience at the same time,” the telephone emerges as a kind of time machine, capable of allowing the past and future to be in conversation. 

The child emerges as a crucial figure in this dialogue, not only due to Radivojević’s memories but because telling the story from the perspective of a child, with their “raw and simple feelings,” allows for expansive “emotional affect.”

It’s a nod to children, “their power, intelligence and resilience.” Instead of sensationalizing the violence of a traumatic experience, what we’re presented with are the moments that made Lana happy, like getting bad haircuts, dancing in the kitchen, or the moment she first felt love for a friend. In choosing to emphasize moments of profound joy, we felt more so her grief when it was stripped away.

“I want to share the heartache,” Radivojević confesses. “The wound can close once you have invited witnesses to the pain.” And the witness could just be yourself.