Biography

Mila Turajlić, born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia in 1979, is an award-winning filmmaker and archive ‘artivist’ whose films include CINEMA KOMUNISTO (2010), and IDFA-winner THE OTHER SIDE OF EVERYTHING (2017). Her most documentary diptych NON-ALIGNED & CINÉ-GUERRILLAS: SCENES FROM THE LABUDOVIĆ REELS (2022) - an archival road trip through the birth of the Third World - was described by The New York Times as ‘a visually arresting inquiry into what it takes to envision a new world’. Her films have screened at numerous festivals including Toronto and Tribeca, and have been released theatrically in Europe, North America and across the former Yugoslavia. She is currently in post-production on her next feature - a documentary made with 96 year-old activist Elaine Mokhtefi.

In 2018 Mila was commissioned by MoMA New York to create video installations for their landmark exhibition on Yugoslav modernist architecture. She is the founder of the NON-ALIGNED NEWSREELS research project (nonalignednewsreels.com) an artistic exploration of the orphaned status of film archives made by Yugoslavia in a gesture of ‘ciné-solidarity’ with the non-aligned world. Performative and video iterations of the project were curated for IDFA on Stage, international exhibitions and biennials (Berlin’22, Belgrade’22, Sharjah’25). Her live documentary performance FRAGMENTS FROM THE DEBRIS has recently become a production of the Theatre Nationale de Bretagne and will be touring in 2025-2027, including an 8-night run at the Theatre de la Bastille in Paris in April 2026.

Mila has been awarded fellowships from the Columbia University of Ideas & Imagination, and artist grants from the Sharjah Foundation and Chicken & Egg. In 2020 Mila was invited to join the AMPAS (Oscars) Documentary Branch. She was named Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres by the French government in 2022.

Mila holds a BSc (First) in Politics and International Relations, London School of Economics (2003), a BA in Film and TV Production, Faculty of Dramatic Arts, University of Arts, Belgrade (2002), an MSc in Media and Communications from the London School of Economics (2004) and a PhD from the Faculty of Media, Arts and Design, University of Westminster (2015).

She lives and works between Belgrade and Paris.