A Hello

Hello everyone,

Very glad to see you managed to find your way here somehow.  Welcome to our little corner.  We are very excited about the launch of this website and are looking forward to the next steps in the last bit of stretch when it comes to taking this film to completion.  With your help and your sheer presence, we are sure the journey to the finish line will be even more productive and possible.   After all, with everyone watching, there is no way not to do what one set out to do. ;-)

I started this film about four years ago and have hundreds of hours of footage from my grandparents’ house in Bosnia from three different shoots, each lasting a few weeks.  I would wake up to the sounds of a rooster, fall asleep to the barks of a dog, and spend the whole day and late evening filming.  As the camera basically became an extension of myself, my grandparents stopped paying any attention to it at all and went on about their lives as though the camera was not there at all.  This gave space for some magic to happen.  

This magic is now captured eternally and I have since been editing and putting together this story in a way that does it justice together with an impeccable team.  Sometimes I look back on the beginning, the very first step of making this film, and it seems to me so long ago. It seems even longer ago than the moment I picked up the camera and filmed the first shot or the moment I saw my grandfather watching out the window and thought to myself, this looks like a film.  The root lies even further in the past, yet it seems like it all happened in the blink of an eye.  As Kafka said:

My grandfather used to say: “Life is astonishingly short. Now, in my memory, it is so compressed that I can hardly understand, for example, how a young person can decide to ride to the next village without being afraid that—apart from accidents—even the time allotted to a normal, happy life is far too short for such a journey.”

Sometimes I feel I was quite naïve when I started making this film as far as the scope of the endeavour and the resources necessary to unfold my vision. Yet, this naiveté has brought me to this point, to near completion, and I will make sure to see it through to the end, no matter the challenges and hurdles.   With your support, even if it is by simply being here, I know we can complete this film in time for festival submissions next year.   The projected completion date for the first production round (picture-lock) is January 1, 2018.  The second production round (colour correction, sound-correction and original score) is projected to be complete by February 1, 2018.  The first festival submission starts in March 2018 with the Cannes Film Festival.  This gives us a buffer of one month.    

I will be writing to you regularly about updates and progress right here, so we can see how close we are getting to our goal. :-) Thank you so much for taking the time to read this, and I will be in touch again soon.

- Nataša 

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