ABSTRACT
Magic realism as a metaphorical language that visualizes metamorphosis applies particularly to the changing understanding of femininity, which, in Teona Strugar Mitevska's 2007 film, "I am from Titov Veles", inscribes fantasies of reproduction, love, and care into the post-communist and post-industrial landscape. I am from Titov Veles attempts to find a cinematic language to capture the paradoxical experience of post-communism. The depiction of femininity with its emphasis on fantasy, however, creates a cinematic language that criticizes the past conventions of socialist realism and current capitalism in which women are reduced to their sexual exchange value. The film creates an allegory of post-socialism that organizes the different historical and cultural references to offer a fantasy of femininity. The costumes' evocations of fantasies of femininity in the realist setting make the women's appearance incongruous. The disjuncture between the fantasy of femininity and post-communism reminds the disavowal of femininity as the precondition for communism's ideology of gender equality.
