This is an edited version of the conversation between film scholar and professor Stanisław Liguziński and filmmaker Stefan Pavlović.
Stanisław Liguziński: Your movie is a registration of the encounter between you and Zdravko - a fisherman who chose to live in solitude around the Bileća Lake, at the border between Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Montenegro. The complex dynamic of that growing relationship is covered in the film, but I’d be interested to learn what ignited that shared journey and your kinship?
Stefan Pavlović: I met Zdravko by chance. I was at Bileća Lake with my grandmother and mother, who both come from Bosnia, when we ran into him. My grandmother slipped that day and twisted her ankle, and Zdravko offered a remedy. He insisted that we go on the lake and look for this tiny fluorescent fish that removes swelling when pressed against the ankle.
I felt a strong connection from the very beginning as his kindness and openness touched me deeply. As I kept coming back over the next couple of years - for a week or two every now and then - our friendship grew. I had a feeling he enjoyed it as much as I did - inviting me into his world and showing it to me rather than explaining. We didn’t forge our bond through conversations. He would show me things and sometimes tell stories, and I would mostly listen, replying only occasionally in my broken Bosnian.
SL: It seems that this emerging mode of communication and the insights that it enables became the focal point of the film.
SP: My relationship to languages in general and Bosnian in particular was never straightforward. A move to Canada at the age of three, added English and French to my already bilingual upbringing, merging it with Dutch and Bosnian. This entangled spiderweb of languages - a cacophony of sounds - developed into a stutter, which in turn triggered a period of absolute muteness in my life. The words were getting arrested in my throat. The absence of language - first Bosnian that got erased entirely, and then the syllables halted by my body - is not a metaphor to me but a tangible condition. Being around Zdravko, whose hearing is impaired and who is both warm and accepting, allowed me to domesticate that negative space where my language issues exist. Between the two of us, we were able to turn the absence into something positive - a playful experiment in awareness and presence. One evening, when we were filming, Zdravko casually remarked that he felt that we had developed our own language. What constituted that language were not only words but circumstances, conditions and the landscape that we were immersed in. We would spend hours on a tiny boat, surrounded by mountains and the ambience of the lake. What we developed was not necessarily a language but a heightened sense of attention, a way of listening to each other that I haven’t achieved with other people. We sat there together, inarticulate, and we were perfectly fine with it. We created this bubble around ourselves, and this is what I tried to make the movie about.
SL: Zdravko mentions he previously rejected offers from other film crews who attempted to make a movie about him.
SP: From the very beginning, after we’ve spent a couple of days on the lake together, I knew that I didn’t want to make a movie about him, one that would put him on display as an “interesting person with an interesting life”. I forbade myself to exploit our friendship like this. I needed to find a way to do it differently, a cinematic language that would speak about the relationship, the space between two people, rather than the people themselves.
SL: How did that translate to your approach and methods?
SP: The intimacy we shared was essential, so I kept questioning my use of the camera. I wanted the camera to be directed by this intimacy. Instead of filming intimacy, I wanted to film intimately, which isn’t easy when one of us mainly looked through the lens, and the other was being looked at. How do you portray what happens between the person filming and the person being filmed in such circumstances? There wasn’t a single answer to that question. Simple gestures of stepping in front of the camera or handing it over to Zdravko happened organically, but they wouldn’t work as an actual solution. Instead, I made the very process of constant questioning of my position and assumed point of view the staple of my method. I accept uncertainty, as when you’re bent on finding the answer, that one answer can invalidate other potential solutions. This attitude led me to develop all those tiny bits, anecdotes, poems and layers of narrative that are rendered through my voice. I wanted the documentary registration of our time on the lake to be the film’s backbone, but I also needed to give body to all those questions sparked by the process. To shift the focus from Zdravko alone to our growing friendship, I had to find a way to leave that lake behind once in a while and inject my own voice into the fabric of the film. The intimacy grew from the attention we offered each other - him, half-deaf, listening to me, and me - almost inarticulate - speaking to him. We floated in a soup of different elements - history, geography, landscape - with no focal point nor hierarchy between those things. I hope that the film manages to show that this whole situation wasn’t about expressing ourselves but about those precious things that emerge when you stumble on attempts to communicate directly.
SL: Was the camera in any way a catalyst for that dynamic?
SP: Definitely. I brought the camera on our first fishing trip, and when I pulled it out, I noticed something happening. Zdravko immediately assumed the role of a guide, showing me his world. Somehow, it never felt intrusive, possibly because of the very reason for those repeated trips, which is reflected in the title of the movie. Very early on, before we even started filming, Zdravko saw a tattoo of a horse on my hand and insisted that we look for this wild herd that lived around the lake. It gave us a reason for the camera to be there and made us look towards something together. Filming over 2,5 years, we actually kept on looking for those horses. The camera was set as we both wanted to capture the moment of finding those horses when it finally arrives. It shifted the power dynamic more than such obvious tricks as turning the camera on yourself. Zdravko has a very powerful personality. He chooses where he goes and what he wants to talk about. He was in complete control of his own performance on camera. He got fully invested, took responsibility for his role and accepted the camera as a part of our journey. His care for the outcome gave the very act of filming additional importance among all the activities we were involved in. Filming became something that we felt we were doing together, and it shifted the dynamic more than those occasional moments when the lens turns towards me.
