Vetre, pričaj sa mnom, Wind, Talk to Me

At the beginning, there wasn’t any idea of a project; it was simply about spending as much time as we could with our mother, and trying to keep her with us forever through the photographs we took of her. Everything our mother did in her life, she did with a huge amount of love. When the cancer returned for the second time, she knew she would need all that love to help her stay alive. She moved to a camp house near the lake in her hometown, trying to reconnect with nature and heal herself through alternative methods. It was there that she began listening to nature and whispering back.

Later, after she passed away, I couldn’t let her go. I began thinking about how I could bring her back, so we could once again share the experience of appreciating life the way she did.

While photographing my mother, I also filmed her for a week. Those intimate moments have stayed with me for a long time, they still do. As I reflected on them, I realized how unique my mother was, and that if I were to make a film about her, she herself had to be in it. With that thought, I knew that if I used material featuring my mother, involving actors wouldn’t make sense, the authenticity of those moments simply couldn’t be replicated. Since I appeared in some of the footage and my voice was part of the conversations with her, it became clear that if my mother was included in the film, the rest of my family needed to be as well. This was a tricky decision. Although my brother and I had taken many photographs of our family, and they were used to being in front of the camera, we weren’t sure how they would respond to being filmed.

During the time of grief, I engaged with my family, listening to their stories, dreams, memories, and even their everyday conversations, while observing and photographing them along the way. I also started recording the sound of our conversations. As I reviewed all this material, I searched for connections, linking the documentary footage with old memories, dreams, and the thoughts and emotions my family shared about my mother. At the same time, I was considering who they were as characters. In film, you can’t capture an entire human story; you are always selecting a fragment of someone’s life to portray. I carefully considered which parts of their lives felt the most compelling, not necessarily the most significant, but the moments that stood out to me during that period.

To begin, I reviewed the material with my mother, focusing on the most impactful scenes and writing them down to create a sense of structure and direction for the film, this became my first step. The second step involved working through all the sound recordings I had with my family and trying to find connections. I listened intently, transcribed the recordings, and reflected on the most significant moments. For example, my grandfather had shared 10–15 stories, and I focused on selecting those that resonated most with my mother’s scenes.

Early on, I made an important decision: I didn’t want the film to be about the past and present. My mother’s way of speaking about life and her connection with nature was deeply poetic, and I wanted to capture that poetry in the film. Yes, I constructed a structure for the film, but it wasn’t fiction, it was a carefully crafted narrative rooted in genuine memories collected from my family. My goal was to create a sense of timelessness, allowing the audience to experience the story without perceiving it as divided into “past” and “present”. I wanted them to feel, as we do, that my mother is still present, her spirit living through us and within us.

Although my family knew what would happen in the film, I didn’t want them to read the script or perform it exactly as it was written, even if it was based on their own words. Delivering lines word for word wouldn’t have felt natural, so I chose to reconstruct the scenes, drawing inspiration from real moments to recreate them on screen. When working with the family, I had to guide them carefully, providing direction to one person while ensuring others could respond naturally. It was a delicate balance between staying open to what was happening in front of the camera and maintaining control to keep the scenes cohesive. Since none of us were professional actors, it was essential that we genuinely ‘felt’ the scenes as they unfolded. I needed to believe that what we were capturing on camera reflected our everyday life, with my family being their authentic selves, while still preserving the emotional connections I had envisioned. I had to balance the structure of the written material with the natural flow of the scenes, ensuring that everything felt real while staying connected to the overarching narrative. There was space for improvisation, but I knew that relying on it too much would make it harder to create strong connections in the editing process.

Lija came into my life a couple of months after everything that happened with my mom, and she immediately became a part of the family. At that time, I needed someone to take care of, and, in a way, I also needed someone to take care of me. The last months of my mom’s life had been incredibly intense. That’s why it’s hard for me to put into words what Lija represents, as she is many things. Just like my mom was.

The motif of nature reflects my mother’s philosophy of life, a metaphor for her way of communicating with the world, as if she were speaking to the wind. Throughout the process of spending time with her and making this film, I found myself reflecting more deeply on life’s big questions. It wasn’t just the conversations we had or witnessing her battle with illness, but also the way she viewed and cared for life that stayed with me. That perspective gave me the strength to embrace and love life more fully. That’s why the idea of “talking to the wind” feels so meaningful, it’s a beautiful way of seeing the world.