26/04/2021 - In his experimental documentary, which triumphed in Visions du Réel's Burning Lights Competition, Stefan Pavlović tells an intimate story of an unlikely friendship

The winning film of Visions du Réel's Burning Lights Competition is an unexpectedly fresh experimental documentary. The first feature-length film by Bosnian-Dutch director Stefan Pavlović, Looking for Horses [+see also:
trailer
film profile], tells the intimate story of an unlikely friendship that also deals with identity, communication and language, with war looming in the background.

Pavlović is the son of Bosnian parents who grew up in the Netherlands and Canada. During one of his visits to his grandmother in a village near the Montenegrin border, he stumbled upon Zdravko, a middle-aged man with lines on his face as deep as if they belonged to a much older person. Over the next two and half years, he kept coming back to film their growing friendship.

The film opens with an image of softly purple skies over a body of water, with writing appearing over it in a clunky italic font, to the sound of typing on a laptop. In it, Pavlović describes how he found the little lake and the tiny island in the middle of it, featuring an even tinier church, and exactly one inhabitant: Zdravko, who has been living there for 19 years. But the image of the skies doesn't stay still. Instead, the camera seems to uncontrollably veer around, and a dog keeps coming in and out of the frame.

The next image shows Zdravko in his boat, plopping the water with a wooden device that produces a sound that irritates catfish so that they come up and can be caught. He is talking to Stefan who holds the camera, and their communication is patchy at best. Zdravko lost his eye in an accident with a car battery and his hearing in the war, which certainly does not help with Stefan's broken Bosnian.

When Zdravko says a word Stefan does not recognise, it is not translated in the subtitles. Pavlović sometimes adds his unspoken thoughts in the subtitles too, obviously wanting us to experience their relationship just the way he did. These segments which take place on the lake and on the island are interspersed with more experimental sequences of the director's travel, in which he struggles to read out the voice-over due to his stutter. When this happens, the images flash to its rhythm.

The relationship between the two gets warmer and closer, with Zdravko occasionally filming Stefan. They laugh together a lot, and in one scene they even cry together. It is certainly fresh to see two men crying in a film, and in his documentary, Pavlović, probably inadvertently, touches upon the issue of masculinity in an unexpected way.

Zdravko, then 23, went to war just at the same time as when Stefan, then 3, went to Canada. The protagonist opted for this solitary life because he could not stand civilisation anymore, a layman's way of explaining PTSD. The director never tells us that his parents left Bosnia because of the war — they must have gone to the Netherlands a couple of years before it started — but the second half of the 1980s in Yugoslavia in many ways represented a troubling introduction to what was to come. It is definitely something that connects the two men whose subsequent experiences have been as different as can be possible.

With occasional flashes of humour, a lot of spirit and emotion, Looking for Horses overcomes its initially uncomfortable form. The viewer grows into the film and the characters, and as it goes on, they get used to its fresh, if rough, approach. It is an original and very touching piece of art from a filmmaker who is not afraid to bare his own insecurities, fears and doubts.

Looking for Horses is a co-production between the Dutch company artTrace Foundation, Bosnia's KAMEN artist residency and France's Momento ! Films, which also handles the film’s international rights.