Mila Turajlić is a documentary filmmaker born in Belgrade, Yugoslavia, whose work explores the intersection of personal memory and political history through film, archives, and performance.

Her latest project, the two-part documentary Scenes from the Labudović Reels: Non-Aligned and Ciné-Guerrillas, premiered in 2022 at both the Toronto International Film Festival and IDFA. This ambitious diptych continues her exploration of archival materials, delving into Yugoslavia’s cinematic collaborations with the decolonizing world.

Mila gained international recognition with The Other Side of Everything (2017), which premiered at TIFF and went on to receive 32 international awards, including the prestigious IDFA Award for Best Feature Documentary. The film was a New York Times Critics’ Pick and was named one of the best films of 2018 by The New Yorker. It also marked HBO Europe’s first co-production with Serbia and achieved record-breaking success in Serbian cinemas.

Her debut feature, Cinema Komunisto (2010), premiered at IDFA and Tribeca, winning 16 awards including the Gold Hugo at the Chicago International Film Festival and the FOCAL Award for Creative Use of Archival Footage. The film was theatrically released across several European countries and broadcast internationally.

Mila’s work with archives spans beyond film into lecture performances, video art, and critical essays. In 2018, she was commissioned by MoMA New York to create archive-based installations for their landmark exhibition on Yugoslav modernist architecture. Her long-term research project Non-Aligned Newsreels—exploring the audiovisual legacy of the Non-Aligned Movement—earned her a Fellowship at Columbia University’s Institute for Ideas & Imagination in 2020, and was selected for Cph:LAB in 2021. Installations and performances from this project have been featured at the Berlin Biennale, Belgrade Biennale, and IDFA on Stage.

She has received support from institutions including the Serbian Film Center, CNC – Cinémas du monde (France), EURIMAGES, the Doha Film Institute, and the Jan Vrijman Fund. She is an alumna of Archidoc, EURODOC, IDFAcademy, and Documentary Campus, and was named a Chicken & Egg Award grantee in 2020.

Mila holds a PhD in Cinema from the University of Westminster, and MSc and BSc degrees in Politics and International Relations from the London School of Economics. She earned her BA in Film and TV Production from the national film school in Belgrade and later specialized in documentary at La Fémis in Paris. Her early career included work on fiction films such as Apocalypto (dir. Mel Gibson), Fade to Black (dir. Oliver Parker), and The Brothers Bloom (dir. Rian Johnson), as well as research and production roles on series for ARTE France and the Discovery Channel.

In addition to filmmaking, Mila is a dedicated educator. She teaches documentary filmmaking and creative archive use at Sciences Po and INASup in Paris, and has lectured at institutions including the Sorbonne, Harvard, and Stanford. She frequently leads workshops at European documentary labs and institutions such as the Scottish Documentary Institute, Balkan Documentary Center, and La Fémis.

Since 2005, she has produced the Magnificent 7 Festival of European Feature Documentary Film in Belgrade, with the mission of building a local audience for auteur-driven documentary cinema. She is also a founding member of DOKSerbia, the Serbian documentary filmmakers’ association, where she served as the first President of the Board.

Mila is a 2021 TED Fellow, a member of the AMPAS Documentary Branch, and in the same year was awarded the titleChevalier des Arts et des Lettres(Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters) by the French Ministry of Culture.