Continued from Part 1
A guiding thread at the Sarajevo festival is Serbia’s fragile politics, which provide an invisible backdrop to Stefan Đorđević‘s debut film, Wind, Talk to Me. A deeply personal exploration of a mother-son relationship, the film won the Heart of Sarajevo for Best Feature Film. Đorđević dedicated the award to his mother Neca, “but also all the mothers who are staying up all night in Serbia worrying about their kids on the streets being beaten brutally and arrested.” Yet Đorđević chose to make not a political documentary but a poetic docudrama that traces the dreamlike flow of time.
The film centers on Stefan, who comes home to celebrate his grandmother’s birthday, the first family gathering since his mother’s death. The gloomy reunion initiates a film-within-a-film: Stefan’s attempt to complete the autobiographical documentary he started with Neca. He returns to the small camper at Borsko Lake where his mother spent her last years, seeking respite from her illness in nature. In the countryside, Stefan rediscovers the rhythm of nature, allowing his memories to drift. In one scene, he lies against a tree, pressed closely to its trunk. (Remarkably, in scenes like this Đorđević managed to avoid kitsch.)
For Neca, who spent much of her childhood climbing trees, the wind was a spiritual principle, for “life is listening to the wind.” Her voice, captured in archival footage, is replayed in the film—a spectral presence that ties past to present: “The wind brings wishes to life.” The tender film was sparked by Đorđević’s own experience of grief, explored in a raw and unsentimental way. His hybrid film is both a tender tribute to his mother and a celebration of everyday life. All family members plays themselves, cowriting their dialogue and developing the script together.
In one of the key scenes, Stefan’s grandmother, who is slipping into dementia, is asked why she washed her dead daughter’s dress. It’s a deeply touching moment that was unscripted, exposing how loss grips each of us in its own way. Much of the film unfolds in a single take, guided by the belief that “life cannot be repeated,” as Đorđević put it after the Sarajevo premiere. The wind itself becomes a character in its own right, at times a subtle background sound, at others a metaphysical force. The film has an escapist feel, as if retreating from harsh political realities into fantasy, capturing the fragmented and asynchronous nature of grief.
After the screening, the entire family gathered on stage, even the dog Lija, who acted in the film after being trained for months. In the Q&A, Đorđević recalled his first visit to the Sarajevo Film Festival, when he appeared as a skating teenager in Nikola Ležaić’s cult coming-of-age film Tilva Roš (2010), which has shaped a whole generation of post-Yugoslav cinema. In Tilva Roš, set in Bor (a town once defined by its vast copper mine, now just the largest hole in Europe), Đorđević played himself, spending his time skating, hanging out with friends, and making Jackass-like video clips.
Wind, Talk to Me nods to Tilva Roš with a skating scene, yet follows a different path. It marks a turning point in the director’s journey, from youthful rebellion to introspection. With Wind, Talk to Me, Đorđević offers something fragile, a story that is drawn from personal life yet is universal. As the jury noted, Đorđević “takes a formally bold and inquisitive approach to his very personal subject,” coming up with “a film of beguiling melancholy and delicate beauty.” In the end, the film belongs to the wind, which whispers that dreams can come to life.
Another compelling Serbian film came from Marta Popivoda. Her experimental short Slet 1988, about Yugoslavia’s last great mass performance, had its regional premiere in Sarajevo. After Landscape of Resistance, about a female anti-fascist partisan, Popivoda has returned with a new portrait film. Focusing on seventy-four-year-old dancer Sonja Vukićević, Slet 1988 intertwines an intimate exploration of the female body with a reflection on how the socialist past continues to inscribe itself into flesh and minds.
As we learn at the start of the film, “slet” is a Slavic word for the gathering of birds in a flock, evoking both protection and sacrifice: “Birds flock to protect themselves from predators and travel together to a better place. Individuals often pay the toll. The flock survives.” In socialist Yugoslavia, a slet was a mass performance celebrating the communist revolution and socialism, as the final event of Youth Day. The last slet took place on May 25, 1988, not long before the country’s bloody dissolution.
The film interweaves three audio-visual layers: a teenage schoolgirl’s diary, archival footage of the last slet, and shots of Vukićević moving through a brutalist gym. These fragments clash and overlap, each reflecting on socialist modernity, its collective rituals, and the fragile bodies that enact them. Inhabiting the architecture around her, Vukićević’s body is a living archive of Yugoslavia. We see her massaging stiff joints back to life, her muscles still remembering old rhythms. The camera rests on her hands, skin, and breath, her gestures fusing collective choreographies with individual expression.
Popivoda sharply cuts to footage of the 1988 performance: the young Vukićević in a white dress, whirling with disturbing intensity, almost obsessed, curls flying, as hundreds of youth frantically encircle her with torches: “We dedicate this performance to all messengers of good news. We dedicate it to the theater and to our spiritual parents, Meyerhold, Kandinsky, Malevich, Chagall, Mayakovsky, Rosa Luxemburg, Stenheim, Toller, Horváth, and all the great artists who believed in the new. We dedicate it to birth, life, love, and home.” It’s a strange mix of hope and foreboding, as if anticipating the collapse of a whole symbolic order.
The voice-over, reading from a teenage girl’s diary, describes the slet matter-of-factly:
It’s usually boring; nobody watches it. This country is in a terrible state, there are no jobs, and there’s Milošević, who is gross. He’s sucking up to Kosovo Serbs and pretending to be a hero. The situation is bad, and they’re saying it can’t go on like this anymore. The slet was totally weird. I didn’t understand a thing. Some sort of dark performance. I was thinking, man, everything’s changing.
The film shifts back from the monumental footage of the performance to the lone dancer in a bleak studio, disenchanted and turned inward. In Popivoda’s tableau of the working-class neighborhood of New Belgrade, the camera wanders from Vukićević’s gym to children playing football in the shadow of socialist-era prefab blocks. Today, a new collective body is taking shape, once again rallied by nationalism, threatening the fragile stability of a country in a state of emergency.
By 1988, the slet was hollowed out by depoliticization and rising nationalism. Youth from Montenegro, Slovenia, and Kosovo refused to participate. The performance no longer rallied Yugoslavia in unity and brotherhood but masked inevitable disintegration. Popivoda captures this feeling through jarring tonal shifts: the ecstatic rhythm of Ravel’s Bolero against Vukićević’s body drenched in sweat and anguish, breathing heavily. Just a few years later, Yugoslavia erupted into war, claiming countless lives, displacing millions, and subjecting women to sexual violence, especially in Bosnia. As Popivoda put it: “a future forever wounded.”
The wounds of Yugoslavia’s wars are still raw in a city commemorating the thirtieth anniversary of the Srebrenica genocide. In July 1995, the Army of the Republika Srpska, under the command of General Ratko Mladić, captured Srebrenica and massacred thousands of Bosniak men. Mladić and other convicted war criminals are still celebrated as heroes among some Serbs. In Sarajevo, the scars of genocide and siege remain visible. Its war cemeteries and bullet-riddled walls along Sniper Alley stand as a warning of what is unfolding today before the world’s eyes, just as Srebrenica was broadcast into living rooms as it happened.
Tarik Hodžić’s Bosnian Knight had its open-air premiere at the festival. It follows a man named Sead Delić, who escaped to the free territory of Srebrenica, where he served as a soldier and survived the 1995 genocide. After the war, he moved to the United States, where he fulfilled his childhood dream and became a truck driver. The traumas of the Bosnian war and the loss of his family continue to haunt him. Traveling through Bosnia, he immerses himself in medieval cosplay, exploring castles, fortresses, and medieval stećak tombstones, while riding his horse through green hills, shield in hand.
Reimagining himself as a Bosnian knight, with constant flashbacks to the 1990s, Delić finds new meaning in his life. Leaving his own time, he enters the golden age of medieval Bosnia, meeting King Tvrtko I, Bosnia’s first ruler in the fourteenth century, and Catherine of Bosnia, who is “my queen.” Hodžić blends footage of Delić with interviews and music, immersing the viewer in the complex history of Bosnia. As the film progresses, what feels touching and authentic gradually slips into what looks like a travel-agency backdrop, with aerial shots and trite music.
Sarajevo’s Gallery 11/07/95, a multimedia exhibition space, preserves the memory of the Srebrenica massacre through photographs, videos, and interactive documentary material. The exhibits reflect on not only what happened that day in Eastern Bosnia, but also on how the events have been represented and mediated, making Srebrenica a symbol of war and genocide worldwide. The Wall of Death is a sixteen-meter memorial inscribed with the names and ages of 8,372 people killed in Srebrenica, alongside walls displaying over six hundred photographs compiled by the mothers of the killed men.
The shocking photos by Tarik Samarah, the founder of the gallery, document fragments of the still-unresolved trauma, capturing scattered objects, bodies, landscapes, and ruins in black and white. For Sontag, war photography has a “deeper bite” than moving images: a photo is a shot, a single image, a shocking “memory freeze-frame.” The camera, she wrote, is “the eye of history.” Samarah’s images make us witnesses but also spectators; photos make things more real and less real at the same time.
A photograph can say: “This is what war does. And that, that is what it does, too. War tears, rends. War rips open, eviscerates. War scorches. War dismembers. War ruins.” Yet Sontag insists that photos do not tell us everything, and “it seems normal for people to fend off thinking about the ordeals of others.” She cites a woman from Sarajevo who, before the siege, saw footage of the destruction of Vukovar on TV and “I thought to myself, ‘Oh, how horrible,’ and switched the channel.” Compassion without action is an unstable feeling.
Gallery 11/07/95 also has on display a series of posters, titled “Greetings from Sarajevo 1993,” by Trio Design Sarajevo, a collective founded by former students of the Academy of Fine Arts. They created a series of dark postcards during the war, using American pop art to send a message from the besieged city. In the exhibition catalogue, Aleksandar Hemon writes: “But people inside didn’t just suffer and die. They also lived, thought, loved, played music, and strived to restore the city into its righteous place in the world, the world that abandoned it so frivolously.” The postcards were designed to show that Sarajevo never left the world but that “it was the world that left Sarajevo.” The world has come back to Sarajevo, bearing witness to wounded presents, pasts, and futures.
