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“…How To Put Myself in a Situation Where the Outside Pain Helps Me Reach the Inside Pain…”: Stefan Djordjevic on His IFFR-Premiering Wind, Talk to Me
Wind Talk to Me German philosopher Ernst Bloch was noted for his introspection and study around what he termed the “utopian imagination.” He put forth the concept of simultaneous non-simultaneity: the possibility that people could live in different temporalities while inhabiting the same place at the same time. Moving image work, by its very nature, can illustrate this idea like no other art form can – even without special effects or CGI. From frame to frame, sequence to sequence, a collection of purpose-built images and sounds floats through their own unique space-time continuum, evoking an awakening, a recognition, creating a genre-defying ode to staying connected to things and people relegated to a past that still feels uncannily vivid in the present.
In his feature film début, a quiet masterpiece entitled Wind, Talk to Me, Serbian photographer and filmmaker, Stefan Djordjevic has cast his family – grandparents, brother, aunt, cousins, nieces, nephews – to encounter their grief and sorrow at the loss of another family member. After hitting a dog on a winding country road, Stefan, who plays himself in the film, brings the injured animal back to the lake house, where he and his family have spent their summers, to nurse the dog back to health. It’s also the place where his mother, Negrica, had chosen to try to heal her cancer with alternative methods, and ultimately, the place where she chose to die. When we meet him in the film, Stefan is on his way there once again to celebrate his grandmother’s birthday. He’s also intent on completing the film he started to make with his mom.
After appearing in Nikola Lezaic’s feature film, Tilva Roš from 2010 during his Jackass days as a daredevil skateboarder and self-punishing wild child, Stefan went on to write and shoot a short fiction, A Handful of Stones in 2017. He directed and wrote another short fiction, The Last Image of Father, in 2019, and directed and shot Portrait of a Dying Giant, a documentary short made in 2023 that really shows off his cinematographic chops amidst the post-apocalyptic landscapes of his hometown of Bor in eastern Serbia. To my mind, somehow, Wind, Talk to Me is reminiscent of Andrei Tarkovsky’s, The Mirror (1975), wherein the writer-director offers a luminous tale of familial togetherness in the face of unending grief. Working with a big cast of non-actors, with Stefan appearing both behind and in front of the camera, there is a sense of something (auto)biographical here as well. But not entirely. The brilliant script explores a distinct mix of various natural elements along with the human beings (and one four-legged wonder) placed within the midst of a lush summer forest setting that sits in front of a flowing river, everything transmogrifying and transforming in gloriously organic ways.
The film is produced by Serbia-based Non-Aligned Films, a boutique film production company run by a group of independent filmmakers, curators, editors, and producers, including Dragana Jovović, of whom Stefan says, “She is the best producer ever. I will never let her go.” They found co-production partners in SPOK Films in Slovenia and Restart in Croatia. The film is supported financially from Film Center Serbia, the Slovenian Film Centre, Croatian Audiovisual Centre, and Creative Europe – MEDIA. Wind, Talk to Me will have its world premiere as part of the Tiger Competition at International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) in The Netherlands in early February 2025.
Upon seeing it – and perhaps because I found myself traveling suddenly and unexpectedly from Helsinki to the California desert following my own father’s death in early November – Stefan’s film seeped into the very marrow of my bones. I couldn’t resist an opportunity to talk to him about the making of this wondrous cinematic homage to filial love, and how even in the deepest states of our grief, grace can be found in abundance all around us.
Filmmaker: I always like to start with a bit of background because I’m ever curious about the emergence of what I guess we could call a “creative impulse” in a person. When from a young age you realize that you’re being called to be an artist of some sort. What or who were your very first creative inspirations?
Djordjevic: I come from a small place; there weren’t a lot of artists there. I went to high school like everyone else in my hometown of Bor, so there wasn’t really inspiration to be found in those early days. The thing that brought me to the art world was skateboarding. I would film my skate crew a lot, and that was the beginning of my creative process. I learned more and more about what the camera could do, the fish-eye lens, this dominant style of expression in filming skateboarding. I fell in love with it.
Filmmaker: There’s this beautiful, seamless amalgam of real life and film life in all the work you’ve done, reaching a pinnacle in Wind, Talk to Me. The first film you appeared in had some of those elements as well since you and your friends were playing versions of yourselves.
Djordjevic: Nikola [Lezaic, director of Tilva Roš] saw this hour-long Jackass-like film that I made with a friend about 20 years ago. I’d become interested in how films came to be made so I did everything – shooting the stunts, being in front of the camera, editing, directing in a way, organizing everything. It was all very amateur, and only after enrolling at the university to study cinematography did I learn how to work in a team and in more professional conditions.
The idea for this film came as my mother was battling cancer, and she had moved herself to our lake house because she wanted to be in nature and fight the cancer with alternative methods. Fifteen years before that, she won that battle, and she was certain when it came back that she’d win it again on her own. But by that time, it had already progressed. Photographing her, at first, the camera became a kind of tool for me to stay close to her. And because I couldn’t help her, I used it in a way to heal, to objectify this situation so I wouldn’t be so crushed by it all.
Starting to film her at first was really tough because I wanted to portray her in the best way. It had a lot of importance for both of us, but not just for the two of us. I was talking with my brother when I started thinking about the script. He told me: “Stefan, this film isn’t just a film for us. If the whole family is going to be in the film, our own kids will get to know her and our grandparents.” This made it an even bigger idea for me, although it was a lot of weight on my shoulders. I don’t have a problem with that weight if the idea, the film, is much bigger than we are.
Filmmaker: Every project you’ve been involved in focuses on a death that greatly impacts the life of a child or young person, specifically, a son. Even in Portrait of a Dying Giant, there is the death of a whole way of life in your native region of Serbia. What does that theme mean to you as an artist and how it’s transformed your life and your work? Part of the profound beauty of Wind, Talk to Me is the transparent and purposeful distillation of your mother’s state of mind and being as she’s transitioning.
Djordjevic: Death has always been around me, as it is for my whole family. My dad died ten years before my mom did, so by the time I was 32, I had lost both my parents. It’s something that struck me, especially with my mother. She was everything to us. She was a single parent with two students in Belgrade, giving her best to provide for us and our education. She was always there. She even supported this crazy Jackass stuff I was doing. Even if she really didn’t want to look at it as a mother, she was supportive. I couldn’t let her go after she died. But death doesn’t inspire me that much. Life inspires me much more. My mother had a huge desire to live. She was so stable, full of confidence, although the illness was incredibly tough. When you see that kind of love toward life, it stays with you forever. I love life even more than ever because of her. The fight she had is one of the most important things I’ve witnessed.
I had started filming my mother during her last summer, and it was a way to capture our intimate talks. I didn’t merely want to capture what she was doing, but to put her in a context that contained a poetic sensibility, reflecting her philosophies of life. This is how my mother and I worked together. When she passed away, it was then I started to think about how to make this film because I didn’t shoot that much material with her. I also knew I didn’t want to make a documentary film.
I filmed a scene where I have a dialogue with my mother about her relationship with nature and the wind. It was so surreal for me at that moment. After she passed away, my whole perspective towards life changed ,and a lot of that had to do with this conversation. It could never be as powerful as it needed to be if I cast an actress to play her. My mom is talking about these things from the bottom of her heart. I didn’t feel like I could ever catch that emotion, that presence in someone else. I knew that material with her needed to be in the film. And once I made that decision, I also knew that it would be impossible to cast actors to play the family. If mother is in the film, then the whole family needs to be in the film. Of course, I needed to talk to them about it to see if they would be open to it. They were very happy to do it. From there, I started exploring their thoughts about her, their dreams about her, the past, the present, trying to connect all this material and see where I stood with it all, how to make the structure work. If you have something from the past and you’re in the present, how do you represent this passage of time?
When I started thinking about time, I knew I didn’t want to make a film about the past and the present. I wanted to make a film in which my mother is still there because this is the kind of feeling we have inside of us, that she’s still with us and she always will be. I needed to find the connections in order to put it into one believable timeline. But it’s not just about the timeline, it’s more about the feeling of her being present, and that’s why the incorporation of the documentary material with the scripted part was the hardest aspect for me to figure out. Filming my family meant working with non-actors, and even though there was a script, I wanted their own spirits inside of the film, so I needed to let them go with what they wanted, to give the cast the space to be themselves.
Also, I didn’t change anything in that space, the lake house, in five years. Every summer for three months every year, I went to the camp where she lived her last days, not wanting to change a thing so the space and the locations would look the same as it was in the time we were there together.
Filmmaker: I think you succeeded in balancing all this quite gracefully. The language of the film itself, even though the overarching theme is grief over a death, is instead about love, an authentic love that doesn’t have to be earned necessarily, but you do have to do something with it because of the power it has over you. There are also these meta-level acknowledgments throughout that you are all making a film together that really moved me a lot. I’m always captivated by what a maker chooses to have inside their frames, and what they decide to infer what might be happening outside of them, a palpable presence that nevertheless a viewer must imagine. Would you describe your relationship with your DP, Marko Brdar? His work here is transcendent. You’re a cinematographer by training. Did you contemplate shooting this yourself?
Djordjevic: I was already visualizing everything while I was writing the script. I tried not to get too stuck on the images in my mind and to remain open to somebody who would come and shoot it. I already had so much on my back. It was impossible for me to be the cinematographer for this film [laughing]. I needed a lot of help if I was going to make it in the way I needed to. I know a lot of good cinematographers, but I didn’t know Marko. He’s Slovenian, and we’d met only once a couple of years before. I re-watched Dad made in 2010 and Safe Place from 2022, films he had shot, and his work in these films put me on some other level around the feelings I felt were important to my film. It wasn’t the visual style of these films so much as the maturity and experience Marko could bring for this kind of piece. That was why I was so persistent in having him shoot this. It took a year to get him on board.
Filmmaker: What convinced him?
Djordjevic: What got him to finally say yes was when he met my granddad. They became the closest friends. My brother and I joke that Marko is the favorite grandson. In person, my grandfather has the eyes of a child, full of love. He just turned 85 and still has so much energy for doing things. Everyone falls in love with him. However, when you put him in front of a camera, it’s a whole different thing. It’s his voice, but not only that – it’s the way he describes things. He’s a cinephile, watching films almost every day but he’s also from a completely different generation with totally different perspectives on things. It was difficult working with him sometimes, and I really needed to find the right approach. When I would ask him to do another take, he’d feel like he’d done something wrong or was being blamed for us having to do another take with 30 people standing around waiting. He wanted to give the best he could for what I asked of him.
Filmmaker: You also have a non-human family member in your cast who gives one of the most incredible performances, staggering in its sensitivity, subtlety and expression. Lija, the dog, has a particular rapport with you and it’s impossible to decide who saves who. She represents so many things to the collective, but also to each member of the family, offering such comfort and solace. She is not a side show character here but rather a linchpin for everyone’s sadness, becoming a spirit guide of sorts, an entity that you must literally crash into to notice her. It comes to seem as if she’s some kind of embodiment of the spirit of your mother, at least that was my reading.
Djordjevic: The entire script of this movie was almost a complete reconstruction of the memories I collected from my family. Much of it is not imaginary; it came from something real, and my deep desire to know how my family felt about mom when they were at their most vulnerable about losing her. The presence of the dog helped to open them up even more.
I’ve always been crazy about dogs and wanted one so much, but my mom disapproved of this idea because she felt that after a couple of months, she’d be the one taking the most care of it; it would be one more responsibility for her. After she passed away, I knew I needed to get a dog. At the time, I was already thinking about having the dog in the film. I didn’t want to make some kind of pathetic film about my mother dying. I wanted her philosophies to be the main thing featured because it was about love, this big love towards life. The whole film needed to circle around this idea. When a parent becomes unwell, the child becomes the parent, and the parent becomes the child. I wanted to find some sub-context for that situation. So, the significance of the dog became a representation of something I could take care of and that would, in turn, take care of me.
Everything that happens in the film happened in real life. I really hit a dog with my car after coming out of a tunnel. It wasn’t Lija, but everything that happens with her in the film was the same. When I approached the dog, it ran away. If it had not run away, I would have taken it with me, but it was too stressed and ran. I had a lot of guilt about it.
I agree that Lija delivers the best performance in the film. She goes through the most profound changes, maximum method acting. She and I were reading a lot of Stanislavsky at the time. [laughter] I got to know her really well, and started thinking about what she could do in the film. But as with everyone else, I didn’t want to ask her to do anything she wasn’t ready to do or would be uncomfortable with. I learned a lot about her fears, her feelings, her needs and figuring out how to incorporate all that into the script, this development of losing a family member and having a new family member come into our lives. Everyone has feelings for her in their own way. I just needed to find the right places for all of it to make a strong narrative, something with a beginning, middle and end that falls between two passages of time.
When I would put something in the script, I would consider how it would be done on set, thinking a lot about the position in which I would put all of them. There are a lot of private moments in the film, and it was important to see them moving away from their comfort zone. But I couldn’t assume to do that with them if they weren’t certain. This is part of the reason why I play the main protagonist, because I didn’t want to put this weight on anyone else. This goes back to the Jackass stuff – how to put myself in a situation where the outside pain helps me reach the inside pain and how to deal with that. All my projects, including my photography work, feel like therapy to me because I’m choosing to shoot something that is very alive, something I’m thinking about almost every day, talking about, dealing with, and then putting into some kind of creative process where I learn a lot about myself and the situations and people around me.
Filmmaker: Is the film you made the film you set out to make? As we’re talking, it sounds as if the making of this surpassed even your highest expectations somehow, or what you thought might be possible. Can you talk about when everything gelled or found its baseline? You manage to ground it so much in real life, as you say, but it plays as if it’s in a realm of its own, maybe even a version of your idea of heaven. It’s not surreal in any facile way, but there’s a transcendence of time and space that is uncanny and thrilling to experience as a spectator.
Djordjevic: I don’t really think too much about expectations. I have a need to do this thing that feels important to me, and that’s my main motive. Everything that happened with my mother changed my whole perspective towards life. If only five people are going to watch my film, and I get to have good conversations with those five people in an open way, that is important. Film is a medium that is a tool for us to connect more. Watching films and getting to make them have enabled me to learn a lot about myself. This really does matter to me more than whether or not audiences are able to read deeply into my film, or not.
I don’t want to generalize, but I don’t think the cinema is the place where people expect to experience something. They come to be entertained. For me, cinema is not that at all. Cinema, and encountering art in general, is a way to learn about yourself, the world you live in, to create empathy for others, other ways of thinking. That is cinema.
The reality is that the way funds and other film commissioning works is that you have to present them a strong structure of the script, and so I had to think a lot about structure. But when we were shooting, I had to figure out how to still maintain that control but also allow the situations to play out very openly. I had to always keep in my head the idea of what was essential in every scene. I don’t need every written word in the dialogues I write to be spoken by the characters, but I do need to believe what they’re saying. I want to feel the life inside, not something constructed by the author.
There’s a scene in the film that illustrates this approach, and that’s the scene with me and my grandmother. We shot it in one take. I didn’t speak to her about what was supposed to happen. I showed her where to be and asked everyone else to give us some space. Marko wasn’t even there, just the camera in position to record our conversation. I sort of knew how she was going to react when I accuse her of something. But I didn’t know that this emotional moment would happen between us. For me, I was inspired by life to make this film. I love the portrait of life that we captured together even more. I wouldn’t change anything for this.
Filmmaker: All the film work you’ve made thus far has been in your hometown, your own country. There are many great makers who choose to stay close to home because it’s a constant source of inspiration and ideas. How important is it to keep turning to your own perspective and experiences to continue to make work that deeply resonates with you?
Djordjevic: Coming from Bor, Serbia is important to me. My whole visual perspective is the way it is because I come from this place. Bor looks like an apocalyptic place, but we never saw it that way. We played football as children at those locations, played house and other games. It didn’t look “out of this world” to us. What’s inside of the people from a certain place is important, not the place itself. It’s the way you can see a place through their eyes.
The stories that are happening around me will continue to fill me with empathy. A lot of things are happening in Serbia. I’m interested in making films and documenting stories that have a very personal approach. I don’t see myself covering big subjects, big ideas or universal themes. The personal approach is the kind of cinema that has always attracted me the most.
I’m hugely inspired, for instance, by Iranian cinema, Kiarostami especially, films that feel so alive, and have lots of humor. They also hold the pain of a real situation. In general, I’m interested in storytelling. That being said, I’m sure if you put me in Sri Lanka or Brazil, Antarctica, whatever, I would find somebody to talk to or to photograph, to exchange something that isn’t necessarily familiar to me but where there is a familiarity that feels similar to how I feel about things. If I see the passion, a need, an urge, love – these are the things I’m attracted to. If somebody has a lot to say about something that comes from the heart, with lots of thought behind it, those things are important to me. This all came from my mother, these philosophies she had about life. In the film, I make fun of her talking to the wind, calling her a hippie. Nowadays, I feel like a hippie too. [laughs] It’s the way I’ve matured in light of losing someone with whom I’ve lost the chance to talk. I’m pretty sure I can continue to discover those kinds of stories and the people who want to tell them.
