Reaching Immortality (2016), a documentary, was imagined as a collective project of, at the time, musicology students at the Faculty of Music in Belgrade. In this documentary, we portrayed the notion of Stevan St. Mokranjac, an eminent composer of Serbian music today. We emphasized the significance of his opus and his influence on the culture of his time and compared it to the present day. In this project, our various contemporaries, musicians and musical writers gave us their opinions.

This project started in 2014 when the centenary of this great composer’s death was marked. The film was imagined as a collage of the recordings of Mokranjac’s music (but also interesting paraphrases of his works), and interviews with musicologists, composers, conductors, and music theorists. Among them are Mladen Jagušt, Bojan Suđić, Zoran Hristić, Vlastimir Trajković, Isidora Žebeljan, Roksanda Pejović and many others. Their discussions led the film to its final form.

The film Reaching Immortality was made as a diachronic, fluid, dynamic story, divided into five thematic parts which should cover the basic biographical data about Stevan Mokranjac, the most important parts of his opus, and demonstrate all the ways how the centennial of this great composer’s death was marked. Among them are four ‘interludes’ which connect the parts, and bring to the surface various data on Mokranjac’s works and influence on the future generations of composers not covered by the main parts.