Dir: Stefan Djordjevic | Serbia, 100′ 2025
Photographer, actor and filmmaker Stefan Djordjevic premieres his debut feature Wind, Talk To Me at this year’s IFFR, and makes a strong statement that indicates a fully formed vision that will make sure he is a name to watch in the future, touching the spiritual highs both of Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Andrei Tarkovsky, but creating something unique in its look at the grief after a parent’s death.
Originally Djordjevic had planned to make a film about his seriously ill mother, but following her inevitable passing he pivoted his focus to his family and his return to their pastoral holiday home in the Serbian countryside.
Before the sojourn to rural life he returns first to the family home to celebrate his Grandmother’s 80th birthday, where he reflects on his most recent path, his mother’s death and the breakup of his relationship. The male relationship with a mother figure has been documented many times before, Camus wrote in his novel The Fall of the inevitability of your mother’s grave, crying.
Juxtaposed against the filmmaker’s mother’s death is nature’s ability to regenerate, soothe, restore and continue. After accidentally hitting a dog with his car our protagonist seeks to atone by rescuing and healing the dog back to health.
When he eventually arrives in the country and to rural life, we acclimatise to a different pace and rhythm, which Djordjevic’s film embraces with the cinematic representation of time and memory, that Tarkvosky called a ‘mosaic made of time’. The film it probably most reminded me of, and is a spiritual cousin to, is the Sheffield Documentary Film Festival prize winner from Bosnia: The Door Of The House Who Will Come Knocking by Maja Novaković.
The film does lapse into the Serbian weakness for mystical nonsense, with the reading of tea leaves and the hope for physical healing through Reiki. This of course makes one think of convicted war criminal Radovan Karadžić, who, while on the run from the arms of The Hague, became an expert in ‘New Age’ alternative medicines.
The closing of the film features on a moving and beautiful conversation between mother and son, one of the many things she says is that “nature answers to miracles”, which is certainly different to how other filmmakers from Herzog to Von Trier look at nature, with their idea that nature is satan’s fortress.
With restraint and clarity, Djordjevic offers a delicate reflection on existence, discovering joy in fleeting moments and small gestures, even as despair lingers. A tender, honest reminder of the power of film and gives us very much an immersive experience and shows cinema’s singular power. D W Mault
ROTTERDAM INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2025
Dir.: Aditya Vikram Sengupta; Cast: Lolita Chatterjee, Ratnabali Bhattacharjee, Sumanto Chattopadhyay, Jim Sarbh; India/France/Singapore 2018, 97’.