Congratulations to Tijana Petrović on the well-deserved award of a grant from the UC-AFT Professional Development Fund for her California Missions Film Project Research. According to Petrović, the film “looks at how colonial history of the Missions was obscured through their transformation into ‘pleasure gardens.’ It considers the production of Mission landscapes as colonizing spaces; how built environments are used to romanticize and distance the past; and how the history of California Missions was co-opted through aesthetic means.”
Petrović teaches production courses for our department including “Special Topics in Media Production: The Essay Film,” “Documentary and Non-Fiction Media Production,” “Intermediate Moving Image Production” and “Advanced Moving Image Production.” Prior to her time at Berkeley, Petrović taught at Stanford and SF State University, and has worked as a cinematographer on many projects.
Like her most recent film project, a 16mm film entitled A Field Guide to Coastal Fortifications, which was an International Film Festival Rotterdam selection 2023 among many others (and awarded Best Film in Beldocs IDFF National competition), the new film, In the Realm of the Garden, makes use of lyrical landscape imagery along with archival footage and historical research to make palpable on film the underlying structures as well as the physical materiality and political implications of the topographies we live within but may not usually call into question. The project has already been awarded partial funding by Canyon Cinema’s Print Generation Commissioning Grant. Check Tijana's website for updates. Congratulations Tijana, and we look forward to seeing the finished film!