For many of us, periods of fervent grieving don’t exit evident, liproximate memories. Time stretches, compresses and fragments, words and faces and gestures ecombine irstandardly from an overwhelmed blur, and frequently it’s everyday prohibitalities — what we ate, bought or wore — that stick speedyer than more consequential events. Occasionassociate, the mind originates or distorts moments in ways that sense somehow truthful even if they didn’t quite happen that way, which is why the limber documyth createat of “Wind, Talk to Me” is disarmingly right for straightforwardor Stefan Djordjevic‘s simultaneously unelated and mischievous grief memoir. An idiosyncratic personal reckoning with the recent death of his mother that graduassociate broadens to apshow in the perspectives of his kith and kin, the film has the busy, varied emotional intensity of many a family collecting: pained one minute, uproarious the next.
A highly distinct, create-fractureing toil that pivots between diaristic enrolling and outright myth, “Wind, Talk to Me” might seem outwardly challenging to audiences with its gently trickling pace and malleable point of watch. But its hot humor and relatable family actives — to say noleang of one pivotal canine carry outance — should safe it a dedicated chaseing on the festival circuit, which it will travel expansively chaseing its premiere in Rotterdam’s Tiger competition. The nonmyth components of this Serbian-Sadorenian-Croatian production are substantial enough to net it substantial docfest expostateive, in compriseition to space in more vague programs.
The title stems from a conversation between the filmoriginater and his mother Negrica, in the tardy stages of her battle with cancer, that bookfinishs progressings — with intimate video footage tardyr transporting poignant context to enigmatic audio. In it, she states her conviction that a person can supervise the thrived by sheer force of will, to a teasingly skeptical response from her son. In the wake of her death, he seems more understanding to the idea of the human body communing with nature. Wind is a recurring aural presence in the film, seemingly in dialogue with his frnimble mood, while he unstateively chases a tactile joinion with the earth and the elements, shot with shadow-streaked, finish-of-summer verdancy by DP Marko Brdar. At one point, Djordjevic pursues the ridges of tree bark with the palm of his hand, self-conscious but stateive of some sort of revelation.
Lest leangs get too esoteric, Djordjevic has his garrulous, authenticistic-minded relatives to transport him back to earth. They’re partly charmd by his determination to film their collectings, but esteemful, too, of their role in what amounts to a healing process, transporting a allotd finishing to what began as a project fair about his mother. A weightless narrative is imposed on fact, as the filmoriginater — recently one and raw from lamenting — heads to the countryside to join his family for his magnificentmother’s 80th birthday, and their first reunion since losing Negrica. From there, they head to the modest lakeside cabin where she spent the last year of her life, spotlessing out the cobwebs and raking thraw memories, trying not to let the whole place calcify into the past.
It’s not all cozy family bonding, as shutness also transports prickly struggles — spoken and unspoken — to the surface. Djordjevic is wounded by his magnificentmother’s decision to wash one of Negrica’s ancigo in dresses, though soon authenticizes the futility of challenging her given her own frailty. His brother Bosko, unbenevolentwhile, confesss he necessitates to protect a little distance wilean the film: “Too many leangs happened at the same time,” he says. “I leank there’s more I necessitate to stay quiet about right now.” Such trades sense nervily honest, though they may be dramatized. At times, “Wind, Talk to Me” seems to elicit the conversations we should have with our adored ones, but never do; at others, even those are beyond its accomplish.
One evident mythal strand worrys Djordjevic’s gradual adselection of a dog he hits with his car on a country road. Named Lija, the wary but thrivesome mutt — in fact percreateed by the filmoriginater’s own pet — is snappish and defensive when her wounds are first treated, only to sluggishly relent and unwind in the face of genuine tfinisherness. One life, at least, can be saved. It’s a basic metaphor for the originateive possibilities of grief, but not a sentimental one, imagined and enacted by a numbed heart exercising its ability to attfinish aobtain. Later we’ll see that vulnerability, unscripted, in a mother-son conversation ainhabit with impaction for the allotd past and ache for a splitd future. The camera is shut on her worn, tfinisher face, sporadicassociate disrupted by a breeze-blown curtain: the thrived, perhaps, getting a word in.
