Documentary film Plain Biljane Tutorov and Petar Glomazić won the Grand Jury Prize for the best international documentary film at the Sundance Film Festival, one of the best, if not the best selection of documentaries in the world - only ten were selected for the documentary program movies from all over the world. It's ungrateful, and somewhat stupid, to compare this achievement to anything - ungrateful because what to compare it to?, and stupid because every achievement is unique - but when we already live in a time of destruction and when it seems that one documentary film crowned with even the most important world award for documentaries will not change anything, then the comparison, with all the risks, must be made: winning at Sundance is as important, and maybe more important than winning An Oscar and Palme d'Or (Cannes), because Sundance is not a spectacle and Sundance does not live up to expectations, but tries to preserve what little sense is left amid the noise and fury. Winning at Sundance means that someone, somewhere, recognized the universal in the unique, the general in the particular.)
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Biljana Tutorov and Petar Glomazić, together with cinematographer Eva Kraljević, spent seven years filming a film about Gara and her daughter Nada on the Montenegrin mountain Sinjajevina, a film about life in the mountain and life with the mountain, about violence against women (which is talked about) and violence against nature (which can be seen), about the daily struggle for survival, about a small mountain community that opposes a military training ground that is Montenegrin the government planned to build on this mountain... This film is about a life that stubbornly survives even when everything turns against it. Visually sumptuous, dense, precise and measured, intelligent and careful, Plain is a true cinematic marvel.
The film will have its European premiere on March 17 at the prestigious CHP:DOX festival in Copenhagen, its French premiere on March 22 at the Cinéma du Réel festival in Paris, and then it will participate in dozens of festivals on all continents.
WEATHER: The content of the film is extremely rich. If you really had to say what the movie is about, what would you say?
photo: nebojša babić...
PETAR GLOMAZIC: The film is about a special mother, a special daughter, a special mountain and their special connection. Then, this is a story about motherhood in the most essential sense, spoken by people, animals, mountains. About Nada's upbringing in a very specific context. This is simply a film about a mountain - in our film it is a character unto itself, breathing, feeling and remembering. The story of our heroines is part of a wider story about the mountain. We would say that the film is also about the consequences of violence, as well as the possible connection between violence against nature and against women. Both violences are the result of patriarchy.
BILJANA TUTOROV: We can also say that our film is about love as a basic life gesture, but also a possible political tool. About the conviction that we must protect what we care about until the last breath and at any cost, that there is no compromise. In the editing phase, we used a working title Acts of love, but we eventually dropped it because of possible wrong connotations and Christian context. The last scene we removed from the film is the scene in which Gara "spys" on his son by reading his "reading book" - Acts of love Serena Kierkegaard - realizing, as she reads to the camera, that Kierkegaard's concept of "duty love" speaks to her own dilemma in life. We removed the scene because we realized that it was too direct and verbally expressed what we wanted to remain as the emotional impression of the film.
Montenegrin mountain Sinjajevina is not close "base" in Novi Sad. How did Petar and you come up with the idea for the film in the first place?
photo: nebojša babić...
BILJANA TUTOROV: The two of us have been together for almost seventeen years. Although we come from different worlds and professional experiences, we share a lot, we often read aloud together, we share the same questions and we are both political beings. We were probably unconsciously looking for a way to make something together. The film about Sinjajevina was started through research that Petar conducted in the field back in 2018. Montenegro is his culture. At that time, we did not know Gara and Nada, and there were just beginning to talk about the military training ground on the mountain. We were interested in the seasonal migration of the local livestock community that travels for days to the summer pastures, but also the unusual color palette, the geometry of the space that is unique and cries out for the camera in its hazy glow. We started looking at the paintings of the great masters, re-reading Knut Hamsun and thinking about a stylized film about people connected to the earth.
PETAR GLOMAZIC: The moment we met Gara and Nada, when it was clear that the militarization of Sinjajevina was inevitable and when Gara mounted her white horse, the movie began. We still didn't know everything, but we felt that there was still a lot to discover. We also felt their need to express themselves, and their desire to "cooperate" was the trigger and the basis of our moral commitment to the story and the protagonists.
BILJANA TUTOROV: The story we sensed is at the heart of my interests in interweaving the intimate and the political, which I also dealt with in my previous film When the pigs come.
PETAR GLOMAZIC: The most beautiful thing, when it comes to this film, was the friendship we developed with Gar and Nada, their family, the wider community, and that determined everything that followed: our process, style and language, the long shooting process, the production framework needed to make it possible.
How long did the filming last?? When did you start the movie?, You couldn't have known the end.?
PETAR GLOMAZIC: We have been recording for more than seven years. Actually, this is a documentary and the first years were research with the help of the camera. It was great that our director of photography and chief cinematographer, Eva Kraljević, accepted the job and spent all those years working with us dedicatedly. We started with studies of space and light, faces and gestures. We noticed that Gara and Nada work a lot, that their routine is cyclical, even that the topics of conversation are repeated. We quickly realized that we couldn't shoot for long hours because we were interfering with their work, because we were also getting tired - the terrain was difficult, there was no electricity, the logistics were demanding - and we wanted to be careful at all times.
BILJANA TUTOROV: We realized, of course, that a "Greek drama" like this, in a strong natural scenography that we understood better and better, deserves all our attention, precision, all our effort and skill. The beginning was completely clear already in 2020, and actually the end. Of course, we could not know how the story would end, but we knew that it would end when Nada was of age and when we felt that we could "let" her alone into a world full of danger, that the camera and the viewer could separate from her. This was a clear emotional, ethical, and dramaturgical indication that guided us through the process.
Why "Greek drama"?
BILJANA TUTOROV: Gara and Nada's story contains a struggle between free will and fate. A moral conflict is at the heart of the narrative that is slowly being constructed. It is built through a focus on a small number of characters, and the mountain takes on the role of the chorus. The mountain does not give explicit comments and moral lessons, but it does so silently as a witness to the actor's fate. The violence that is being talked about is not visible, just like in Greek drama. Draško Adžić's music is part of the "chorus" in that drama, that is, it is connected to the image of the mountain and has a very precise role.
PETAR GLOMAZIC: In the end, at "Sundance" we witnessed the audience's catharsis when they realized what had happened, and we could not have fully predicted that. We became aware of some elements early in the process, but careful work on the construction of the film in editing and listening to all its levels led us to the film we really wanted. Gara became Prometheus in her battle with the forces and she recognized this when she said she was happy that her story evoked the stories of many women throughout the ages. It was especially important to me that from the culture of heroes and warriors that I come from, we are bringing a story about women, whom history usually forgets.
There is almost no part of the film that is not visually impressive. No, if nature itself has already offered itself to you with its beauty, How did you shoot the interiors??
BILJANA TUTOROV: When we watched the entire recorded material again at the end of the montage, it was clear that at first we were at a distance, that we experimented a lot, and then the camera got closer and closer, we understood the space - both exterior and interior - found angles and actually became part of the space and the household. We looked at a lot of old masters because the light of Sinjajevina reminded us of the dramatic biblical lights of Claude Lorrain, Caspar Friedrich David, Giorgione, and the interiors of Rembrandt. Eva has a special sensibility and brought a lot of skill and patience to the film.
PETAR GLOMAZIC: For example, the beauty of nature was the most difficult to film, because it is difficult to avoid the postcard perspective and naturalism, and in our film nature plays a psychological role. Nature is a reflection of what happens in the inner worlds. We worked a lot on that. Gara says that Sinjajeva is her only mother, because she had no other, and that she would not have saved her mind if she had not been able to "talk" to the mountain, so that relationship determined the role of nature in the film.
BILJANA TUTOROV: The interiors are tight, it took us a while to figure out the exact relationship between the perspective of the landscape and the interior. The decision was to film only during the season on Sinjajevina, not to go to the valley with the protagonists in winter, but to stay with the mountain.
photo: nebojša babić...
How much time did you spend on the mountain itself??
PETAR GLOMAZIC: In total, we accumulated 230 days with the camera over the years, but often we recorded less and listened more. We spent a lot of time with Nada and Gara, sometimes we slept in their hut, helped, talked, cooked, defended the mountain. Working together to understand the value of Sinjajevina, the legal and European framework that can preserve it, working in cooperation with domestic and international organizations dedicated to the preservation of local and indigenous communities - all of this brought us closer together. Nevertheless, we knew that we were not interested in an activist film, even though we were activists and ambassadors of the "Sinjaevin case".
BILJANA TUTOROV: We didn't plan the most valuable scenes, they would have happened when we were filming something completely different and banal. The most valuable scenes would be impossible to direct, but when they happened we were ready - we understood what was happening and what we were interested in, we knew the space, we understood how to record the sound without disturbing. We had an open relationship with the protagonists and in the production we fought for time and resources, for the possibility to follow the rhythm of our trust. However, in a few cases we went out and left the camera thinking that we wouldn't even use the material, and then Gara would remind us that they wanted to talk about themselves.
What are they "the most valuable scenes"? The film is so dense that there are no worthless scenes. Magnificent episode, let's say, with a cow and her calf high in the mountain...
PETAR GLOMAZIC: There are several scenes that could be developed into short films. As a rule, these situations happened unexpectedly, they express much more than what they strictly talk about, and they have a meaning for each of the narrative lines. We think of the scenes that were possible thanks to the complete trust between us, the protagonists, and often the animals.
BILJANA TUTOROV: Fog, for example, plays a dramatic role in the film and it was inspiring for us to work with natural elements, evoking situations that we noticed repeating themselves in different lights and atmospheres. One whole part of the film is in fog. The scene you mention is one of those, it reflects the inner states of the heroines, the essence of motherhood, trust, as well as all the dimensions of the story, everything we wanted and dreamed of transferring to the "screen".
PETAR GLOMAZIC: We shot for days, stalking them in the fog, before that scene happened. Eva, who, despite the great effort of moving through the hilly terrain, remained connected to the situation and to Gara and Nada, is very much to her credit.
BILJANA TUTOROV: We were able to shoot such scenes after years of bonding and understanding what we were looking for. Cow Flora got her anthological role there, without two scenes with her the film would not have the same value. It's the same with the bed scene. You can't plan and order some things, it wouldn't be ethical, and we wouldn't know how to do it. The documentary film also rests on the miracles that happen, and we prepare for a long time to see and understand them properly with the camera.
Was there an agreement with the protagonists?? There are hardly any scenes where the heroines look at the camera...
BILJANA TUTOROV: There are several looks to the camera that we left in the film with a clear intention. Of course, these are not the only looks into the camera. At one point, we realized that we had the material we needed for a delicate, slowly building drama. We used materials from the last years of filming, the situations were repeated, we were more and more connected and indeed some scenes are so strong and build up as if we have complete control, as if it were a feature film. That's why we left those looks in the editing, so that it is not forgotten that we are there, to say that we are aware that we are part of the reality we are filming (and for which we have accepted responsibility and a moral mandate), that we influence it with our presence and gaze, that the film is strong and because we have the complete trust of the female protagonists.
PETAR GLOMAZIC: There were a lot of agreements in terms of when we shoot and what we shoot, but these agreements usually changed because the animals calved, lambed, lost, injured, got sick, etc. We weren't looking for intimate moments, nor would we ever get them, and they weren't even in our focus - we were more interested in how their fate is reflected in reality and read in gestures.
None of the female protagonists - neither Gara nor Nada, nor the neighbors Rajko and Ljilja, who also have important "roles" in the story - has no vanity in her and has no established relationship with her self-image and the camera. They are smart and understood that we have nothing to do with television, but that we are making an "artistic" film, that we are interested in everything and that we are obsessed with certain elements, that we are like painters with a lens.
In other words, you have earned the trust of those women?
BILJANA TUTOROV: The trust we've earned and the confidence we've built over time have allowed us to make exactly this kind of film, exactly the film we wanted - and to feel good about it. We don't need to dirty it in order to testify to its authenticity, nor to further stylize it or heighten it emotionally. There was material for both.
PETAR GLOMAZIC: It is wonderful that Gara and Nada love the film, that they recognize themselves in it and feel that it is not only about them but about women throughout the ages.
Unusual things happened at the screenings (applause in the middle of the movie). Gara and Nada received a standing ovation. How did they manage in "to the big world"?
PETAR GLOMAZIC: We took the entire creative team to Sundance, which was rewarded with two standing ovations, and when Gara and Nada came out, they were received incredibly warmly. They are smart, modest and always in the right place within themselves, and they managed better and more eloquently than all our ministers combined.
We were surprised by the reaction of the audience. We were nervous about going to America with a slow European film at all, but the premiere was like a rock concert. The audience laughed, cried, and we were especially surprised by the applause when the story about the training ground was resolved.
BILJANA TUTOROV: It was repeated at every screening and then we realized that we all feel so hopeless in a world where institutional democracy is clearly in crisis everywhere. One small victory seemed to give everyone hope that we can fight to participate in our own destiny. This is a small part of the story and belongs more to the context, but it is indicative that many criticisms focused on this moment. We deliberated for a long time with the editor whether to include it in the film or not, we did not feel that a "happy ending" was accurate for our reality. True, there is no film with that victory either happy end, unless we perceive the strength of the heroines as the ultimate victory.
