A Film a Week - The Mountain Won't Move / Gora se ne bo premaknila

 previously published on Cineuropa

Usually, documentary projects spend more time in development and production than fiction ones do. Having two projects premiering some two months apart at reputable festivals is an oddity which has happened to Slovenian filmmaker Petra Seliškar this year. After the premiere of her mid-length effort My Summer Holiday at FIPADOC in January, the filmmaker now presents her feature-length work The Mountain Won’t Move at Visions du Réel. It is no coincidence, though, because the two films share the same subjects, location and topic.

Seliškar takes us up into the Šar Mountains, where three brothers, Zekir, Zarif and Zani spend several months a year looking after their family’s flock of hundreds of sheep and their dozens of cows. The youngest, Zani, stays in the lower hut with the cows, while Zekir and Zarif venture to the upper “bachilo” stone-and-wood house with the sheep. During the summer, their younger brothers join them to learn the trade and provide help. Their life is free from the burdens of modernity, but also quite dangerous owing to the harsh weather and even harsher beasts. Luckily, they have a large number of shepherd dogs to protect them and keep them company. Zekir serves as the leader of the brothers and the teacher, preparing them to continue the centuries-old tradition, but as Zarif grows, he expresses an interest in trying out a different, more modern way of life. Zekir is also at a crossroads, as he is getting too old to spend such an amount of time up in the mountains with the sheep, while he also misses his favourite dog, Belichka, who is being held by a shady breeder.

The filmmaker is less interested in telling a story here (the mid-length is more structured to serve this purpose) than she is in observing the relations between the brothers, and those between them and the breathtaking nature that surrounds them. And in such isolation (some of the shooting locations are at an altitude of over 2,400 metres), where the only structure comes in the form of daily routines, the young men’s minds tend to go into overdrive. The occasional bouts of narration that Seliškar applies are both matter-of-fact and poetic, so they better succeed in painting a picture of the mental states, rather than in driving the story, which is also the filmmaker’s intention.

Technically, The Mountain Won’t Move is a maverick work. The filming took place over several weeks-long spans during a period of five years, and the locations are not exactly accessible, so the image- and sound-recording crews had to follow the subjects around during their mundane, repetitive work for days on end over the harsh terrain, taking care not to step into the others’ line of sight and not to disturb the harmony between the animals. The end result is nothing short of amazing on a sensory level. From cinematographer Brand Ferro’s point of view, we can see both the beauty and the danger of the place in bright, summery colours and crisp, digital visuals. This beauty and danger are further enhanced through Vladimir Rakić’s sound design, in which we can make out individual noises over the overall natural cacophony, while the austere use of Iztok Koren’s ethno-sounding music is also a nice touch.

For sure, there are parallels to be drawn with other documentaries about people in nature and people on the fringes of society, as Seliškar is not trying to redefine these sub-genres. However, The Mountain Won’t Move is a deeply personal work and a frank, in-depth observation of an endangered way of life.

A Film a Week - Soil and Wings / Krila i tlo / Toprak ve Kanatlar

 previously published on Cineuropa

We tend to see religion in a certain, uniform light that is highly simplified and often unfavourable, to put it mildly. If we were to take Islam as an example, the first images that could potentially spring to mind may be the stereotypes of discrimination against women and fundamentalism. However, Islam is more diverse than that in a theological sense, as it is merely a wider framework of varied “schools of thought” and customs, beliefs and practices that are rooted not just in different interpretations of the scripture, but also in different folklores.

In his newest documentary Soil and Wings, Serbian filmmaker Stefan Malešević takes us to a very small and very specific Muslim community in North Macedonia. They are Bektashi, a small “sect” residing in the village of Kanatlarci. Their origins stretch to the Janissary soldiers of the Ottoman Turkish empire, while their practices are Sufi-Dervish. Soil and Wings has premiered in the regional competition of the 21st ZagrebDox.

On the “soil” level, we get to learn a thing or two about the community through the members of the Arifovski family, their hard-working life in the countryside, where they grow tobacco and watermelons, and their ways and beliefs. For instance, they are pantheists who equate not just women with men, but also humans with animals, plants and other things believed to have a soul. They also drink alcohol and find it medicinal in small doses. They speak an archaic dialect of the Turkish language, but the elders who have more contact with the outside world also communicate in Macedonian. And although they live in some sort of seclusion from other nations and religious groups, they do not reject the modern world. On another level, that of the “wings”, we get to see their psychedelic, mesmerising rituals being practised, and to hear their equally psychedelic and mesmerising myths and legends that shape their inner worlds.

Malešević definitely has a knack for studying small, secluded communities, as he demonstrated in his previous documentary Gora (2016): he proves he has the eye of an anthropologist, trying to capture the human essence beneath the surface of economic conditions, the burden of history and daily politics. With Soil and Wings, he immerses himself in the milieu even more deeply, and the result is not an observer’s film about the Bektashi people and their community, but rather a movie that feels, and is, very “Bektashi” in terms of its atmosphere.

Working as his own cinematographer, Malešević often uses long, slowly rotating panorama shots that become the perfect tool to either portray the tranquillity with which his subjects approach their lives, or to give a visual background to the voice-over narrations of their legends. The intelligently austere use of the music, composed by Branislav Jovančević, and the discreet sound design by Bojan Palikuća complement the visual component, while Jelena Maksimović’s typically inspired editing establishes a fitting, meditative pace.

In the end, and especially in its otherworldly ending sequence, Soil and Wings becomes quite a hypnotic experience that remains respectful to its subjects, and faithful to their way of life, rituals and beliefs. As such, it should also stay with the viewer for a long time after the screening is over.

A Film a Week - The Love Room / Ljubovnata soba

 previously published on Cineuropa

When the topic of prisons arises in both fiction films and documentaries alike, the focus usually falls somewhere inside the walls: inmates, guards, the management or the whole prison system. Filmmakers normally pay little attention to those who have stayed on the outside and whose loved ones are behind bars. But Suzana Dinevski’s The Love Room is one of the rare films that does, as it puts the wives of two inmates in the same prison, Idrizovo near Skopje, in the spotlight.

As a work in progress, The Love Room won the Neaniko Plano Subtitling Award at last year’s Thessaloniki Documentary Festival. Its world premiere at the Phoenix Film Festival and its European one in the regional competition of ZagrebDox ended up being just three days apart. Bearing in mind its universally interesting topic and the fresh angle it adopts, a tour of smaller documentary and human-rights film festivals should ensue.

Milan Zarubica was sentenced to 13 years in prison for the illegal production and distribution of narcotics, while Daniel Ilievski got a ten-year stretch for assault. Both men are married with children, so every month, they are allowed two family visits and one conjugal visit in one of the several rooms that lend the film its title. On top of that, Daniel enjoys the right to have several weekend releases per year. But these two men, although frequently observed in their prison routines (in Daniel’s case also during leave), are not the protagonists of Dinevski’s film; Milan’s wife Olivera and Daniel’s spouse Ljupka are. On top of being observed in their daily lives while their husbands are absent, and during their own visits to the prison, they also get the chance to speak their minds and express their feelings in interviews and narrations.

Dinevski uses a red herring, of sorts, to open the film, showing Daniel’s routine indoors and Olivera’s outdoors to trick us into thinking that they are a couple. It’s only when we learn that Daniel is going out to visit his family and Olivera, along with her son Filip, comes in to visit Milan that we come to realise the relationships between the characters and their statuses, both indoors and outdoors. The filmmaker also establishes her signature style as a fine blend of different documentary approaches, shifting between an observational one laced with some lyrical, pensive moments (kudos to Honeyland cinematographer Fejmi Daut on doing an equally impressive job here) and some more restrained portrait interviews – and it works, most of the time. In the observational parts, Dinevski sometimes opts for the frequent use of close-ups and irregular angles, which adds to the dynamism, while the measured use of Duke Bojadžiev’s score in the right places adds a bit of mood.

The differences in the couples’ backgrounds add a sense of diversity, but these same differences could also be blamed for the fact that the two female narrators do not fare equally well as the doc’s “characters”. Simply put, Olivera, who is better educated and more eloquent than the down-to-earth Ljupka, gets more of the spotlight and more of a chance to tell her story compellingly. An additional problem appears in the form of the repetitiveness of the themes that crop up in their monologues, suggesting that Dinevski did not dare to encourage them to open up fully and that The Love Room could serve its purpose better in a more compact, mid-length format. Nevertheless, it is still decent as a feature-length documentary.