-
Education
- 1988-1994
studies at FAMU, Prague
- MFA in
Film Directing at the Prague Film and Television Academy (graduates
“cum laude” and is awarded the honorary "Red Diploma"
by the Dean’s Office)
Professional experience and works
- Begins his career as a film maker with "Shooting Days" - a feature documentary about Emir Kusturica, whom he follows closely during the making of Underground (Winner of the Palm D’Or in 1995).
- A. Manic has Translated theatre plays, novels, poems and essays (mostly into German).
- Happy
Valley Producer, director, writer, co-editor
This 90 minute feature documentary, a two-time winner of the Czech State Grant for Cinema, reveals the secret life of Shutka, a Macedonian village known as the Roma-capital of the world.
- 35mm colour,
black&white
- Cinema distribution in 2003
2000 - 2002
- The
Walls of Kosovo Producer, director, writer, camera
operator
- This documentary captures the troubled relations in Kosovo on the brink of war, allowing the Serbian as well as the Albanian point of view to emerge.
- (56 min.,
Digi-Beta)
- Following this documentary A. Manic is invited over the period of two years to comment on the Kosovo crisis and Yugoslav political issues for Czech TV (political talk shows, news programs), for newspapers and for Radio Free Europe.
1998 - 2000
- Shooting
Days Producer, director, writer
- A documentary
essay about Emir Kusturica. This film examines Kusturica´s artistic
methods and philosophy in the context of the making of Underground.
- (73 min.,
35 mm, colour)
- European
premiere: IDFA (International Documentary Festival of Amsterdam) –
official selection
- UK-premiere:
Sheffield's International Film Festival
- World
distribution: Jane Balfour Films.
1994 - 1996
- Aleksandar
Manic’s films were sold to ever 15 countries. His filmography includes:
- The
Astropolitan
- portrait of Gustav Toth, an old peasant who has learned to speak seven
languages without having ever left his homeland Vojvodina, a province
of Yugoslavia. Waiting for extraterrestrials to pay him a visit and
eventually free him from his wife Rozsa, he tries to open the doors
that are kept by her under lock and key.
- The
Battlefield - a satirical documentary on a group of Czech men and
women who have dedicated their lives to the quest for national identity.
Getting drunk, dressing in self-made costumes and staging Medieval battles
gives them a strong sense of the heroism of their ancestors.
- Falling
and Rising
- a portrait of an incorrigible crook, whose tragicomic destiny has
led him from his hometown somewhere in Bosnia through a respectable
number of prisons and insane asylums all over Europe to Prague and into
the arms of God. While his landlord, a Jehovah’s Witness, tries
to convert him to the good, Ivo’s constant need for love and recognition
gets him back in trouble.
- The
Orphans of Enver Hoxha - documentary about former political prisoners
in Albania who believe to have been betrayed by the post-communist Government.
The compensation for lifelong forced work in concentration camps turns
out to be a “pyramid scheme.” Once doomed as the “Outcasts”
by the Communist regime, they now believe that their lives are confined
to a vicious circle of injustice.
- The Dredger – documentary about the revolutionary uprising in Serbia on October 5th, 2000, which lead to Slobodan Milosevic’s downfall and subsequently to his extradition to The Hague War Crimes Tribunal. It portrays three man who decided to conquer Belgrade in a fight for democracy and human rights.