Last night I found out A Performance of Valour was one of three films that won the List of the Significant Achievements award at Alternative Film/Video, plus the Sonja Savić Award, an additional award which goes to a female filmmaker and in honour of the Serbian actress Sonja Savić (1961-2008) and given in partnership with Nadežda Petrović Čačak Art Gallery.

This was unexpected news because I didn’t even consider I had a chance to win. The jury statement (added below) made me happy that an audience abroad gets the work I made, compared to lack of acknowledgement or reaction I’ve received here in my own backyard.

Thanks and gratitude to the 3 jury members, belit sağ, Dušica Dražić and Igor Simic. Their statement:

ALTERNATIVE 2023
Jury decision

Sonja Savić Award: A Performance of Valour – Hind Mezaina (4 min)
A vibrant, colorful and joyful undermining of masculinity. An archival recontextualization, deconstruction and subversion of orientalism. We appreciate the video’s visual speculation of Emiratis on intertwining a possible disco dance competition of today and traditional dance.

Pixels of the Orient – Warren Chan (9 min)
A comedic take on mainstream Western TV media depiction of East Asian diaspora with a playful use of commercials, sitcoms, and soundbites divided into chapters. Orientalism and exoticism are deconstructed in their visual, commodified, and prejudiced tropes of the “far East” to reveal the mirage of “authenticity.”

OilMoonNight – Anna Malina (6 min)
This film full of formal experiments skillfully translates digital glitch and computer aesthetics into analogue material and paper cut-outs. Error messages and soundscapes from 90s computers are super-imposed onto dead bodies and female portraits. Mixing figurative and abstract motives creates painting-like images that resemble an emotional landscape after a violent event.

It looks like I’m in very good company and hope I can see the other two films soon. You can download this year’s catalogue from here. After going through it, I felt even more sad for not being able to attend.

Besides sharing the award with Warren Chan and Anna Marina, I am also sharing it Moath "Qonami" Bin Hafez who produced the remix featured in the video.
And an extra special thank you to Neil Young who curated this year's edition and for selecting my work.

The Sonja Savić Award is named after the Serbian actor Sonja Savić (1961-2008), described as an “an outspoken critic of the direction the country was taking, in terms of cultural and political values”. I also found this quote about her, “She was a bit of an alien who was not interested in ordinary, trivial things, both in life and in acting." She was also Virgo like me.

Nadežda Petrović Čačak Art Gallery is named after Nadežda Petrović (1873-1915), “a Serbian painter and one of the women war photography pioneers in the region”.

Alternative Film/Video is a festival that was established in 1982 in Belgrade, Serbia (Yugoslavia), “As a meeting place for artists, theorists, critics and the audience, the festival’s mission has been to record and theorise movements, promote constructive values and support new creative possibilities in visual media. The festival provides a glimpse of the current state of new film and video tendencies in the region and the world...The festival’s specificity since the beginning is that it doesn’t award films hierarchically – instead, the jury selects works for the List of the Significant Achievements of the festival.”

All of this information about the festival and the awards feels extremely befitting, and I am honored and happy for this recognition.

A Performance of Valour Awarded at Alternative Film/Video 2023