Fragmentary time and personal crisis in Ivana Mladenovic’s Ivana the Terrible

This article explores Ivana Mladenovic’s 2019 film Ivana the Terrible, focusing on its engagement with historical and personal trauma along the banks of the Danube on the RomanianSerbian border. The film weaves together Mladenovic’s personal experience with broader sociopolitical dynamics, examining the collapse of Yugoslavia, the impact of shifting borders, and the psychological residue of these transformations. Central to the film is Ivana’s personal crisis, intertwined with the unresolved communist past of the region. A remnant of this past, the Kladovo Festival is a symbol of past cross-border camaraderie and contemporary economic desperation on the Serbian side, and for Ivana it becomes the point in which timeframes converge to create a background for her personal crisis that is complicated by historical trauma. The article analyzes how the film blurs the lines between fiction and reality, past and present, highlighting the protagonist’s internal struggle as a metaphor for intergenerational trauma. Mladenovic’s non-linear narrative and fragmented storytelling mirror the effects of trauma, presenting Ivana’s personal breakdown as symptomatic of larger historical forces. By examining the relationship between personal and collective histories, the study underscores how unresolved traumas can perpetuate a sense of dislocation and identity crisis, destabilizing one’s ability to navigate the present.