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| Istina |
Every year when the Oscar shortlisted shorts are announced, there are inevitable disappointments for those projects which have enjoyed festival success and yet just missed out on the big time. Oscar voters don’t always make the right choices, and as every viewer’s tastes differ it can be worth checking out those that came close. This year, one of them is Tamara Denic’s Istina (which translates roughly as ‘Truth’), the story of a Serbian photojournalist whose work documenting protests by people hostile to the mainstream media exposes her to significant personal risk. Anxious to protect her young daughter, she relocates to Germany, but even there, she may not be safe from international networks of conspiracy theorists.
This director was recently joined by producer Christia Siée and stars Nika Rozman and Milica Vuksanovic for a discussion about the film.
It began, says Tamara, with screenwriter David M Lorenz, who wanted to make a film about a photojournalist with a child and take on the subject of fake news and demonstrations in the process. It was a natural fit for her as a director.
“Fake news is something that's so present in the last couple of years and grew so much in Germany due to the corona pandemic,” she says, explaining that this in turn gave rise to a series of protests by conspiracy theory believers. Recognising that it’s an international issues, and drawing on her own experience of migration, influenced her choice of location.
“We wanted to build an international bridge to another european country and chose Serbia, and not only because of my background, but also because of geopolitical reasons, because especially in the West, Balkan Serbia, I would say, is a very exciting country. On the one hand, it's been an EU candidate for years. On the other hand, it’s not having any reform or any visible effort to get into the EU, and skepticism in the society is raising against the so called West.
“The situation of journalists is very bad. About 95% of the press is financed by the government and therefore also controlled by the government. And you have about 5% independent journalists. They're really fighting hard because they are not only getting suppressed by the politics, but also there are some...” She struggles for the word, meaning to say ‘tabloid press’. “They are putting lies about them in the newspaper, so making it public. We have a scene in the film where you can see this, and it's a direct reference to something that happened to a Serbian journalist.
“In Germany, of course, the situation is much better. We have a stable democracy and free press. But especially during the protest against the corona measurements, the attacks on journalists doubled in one year. I think 2020 was the most dangerous year for journalists in Germany for ages. I think it's very important to make a film about this.”
Christian explains that he had previously worked with the writer and got good results.
“We have the same style, taste and approach to the way we want to produce films. Now, we have a topic that really is important to us, we want to take an audience on this journey with this topic.
“For me personally, with this story and the topic, it really touched me, because one of my best friends is actually a journalist from Colombia, and he left his country because he got threatened for his work in his own country. He still works in Germany as a journalist, but gets really threatened for it.
“When the war in Ukraine started, there were a lot of pro-Russian protests in Serbia, in Belgrade, that were also very violent. And we talked to a lot of journalists in both countries and also to one photojournalist that goes to those protests and almost got lynched for his work at one of those pro-Russian protests. All these aspects really motivated us to continue with this project and story and to tell the story in both countries.”
“I got a call from my agent in Sarajevo,” says Nika, explaining how she came on board. “I'm actually from Slovenia. And she said, ‘I have a role for you if you can do this audition. It's for Serbian journalists.’ I said ‘Okay, I can try it.’ And as soon as I got the script and read it, it moved me somehow. I said ‘I really want to do it.’
She sent an audion tape, she explainsand Tamara saw it and was immediately keen to meet.
“It was actually very important for me also, because I'm from Slovenia,” she adds. “At that moment we had a right wing government and there were actually some attacks on our national television. It seemed so near to me, what was in the script. And I think it's great material for an actress to do. It's like her relationship with her daughter. And then this dilemma, to stay at home or continue with her work, although it's very dangerous, but somehow following this role she has in the society, to find the truth, I think it's very important. And I think reading the script and preparing for the role, I saw that journalists really are heroes of our time.”
She worked hard on building up the mother/daughter bond with 12-year-old Milica.
“I would say we were super lucky to find her,” says Tamara. “She is very talented in her young years. She's experienced with acting on stage and on screen, and she is just brilliant, full of fantasy, full of very playful, with very big intuition.”
With Tamara and her mother taking it in turns to translate, Milica explains that she found the role very interesting and exciting. She like the fact that multiple languages were spoken on set, and she also liked filming in hamburg, as it was her first ever visit to Germany.
Filming the demonstrations was a challenge, says Tamara. “We worked with a stunt coordinator and had to find stunt fighters for all the stunt scenes, so we had a lot of rehearsals before the shooting. And also, it's a student project, and we had to rely on volunteer work. The extras were coming and working for free for us. And we knew already, okay, we won't have a huge demonstration. We hoped for 70 people.”
They actually got fewer than 30, she reveals, and most of them looked far too clean cut, which is one of the reasons why the camera stays really close to Nika during the demonstrations and we only see parts of the bodies of most of the protesters. There was a lot of careful editing involved. The scenes were informed by real demonstrations against Covid measures, which she attendeed with DoP André Stahlmann.
“This was very important for the research, but also for us, because, of course, we filmed. We had a camera, I did sound. And to experience this energy when we were there. And the moment we put out the camera, we could feel how the people stopped smiling at us. We felt that we were just in that moment getting dehumanised and that we were now the enemy.
“We had verbal attacks. People came to us, touched the camera, wanted to keep us from filming. For us, it was very important emotionally and also for the directing to experience this and to see the journalists, but also we could collect the sound and use it for the film.”
We often see the far right depicted as exclusively male, I note, but in this film there are women involved in making threats. Tamara tells me that was a very deliberate choice.
“It was important for me also to show that the violence is not only male, that we can have aggressions in different ways also, like verbally and physically. The personal experiences my DoP and me had on those major demonstrations, there were neo-Nazis coming very close to us. They were a group of male people, but of course, you could see as many women, too, that were very aggressive.
“It was important for us that even during protest scenes where we're not really specific, like, what kind of people is it?” adds Christian. “There are many different people at this protest experienced in Germany, especially with the Covid measures also. It's a short, of course, so we don't have the time to tell the psychologically complex aspect of those protests. So that's why they're not specific. But we definitely wanted to show the diversity, because they're older people, younger people, different genders. There's so many different people nowadays that have those beliefs.”
“They were definitely challenging [scenes to shoot],” says Nika. “But we had lots of practice with it, with the stunt team, and I felt very safe as were shooting it. We had a few days of rehearsal just for that. So when we did it, we knew exactly what we were doing, where the camera was, and I felt safe. And we could repeat it few times just to get the right shot.
“It was exhausting. But I think maybe the hardest thing was to really try to find this character. She's very soft in one way, privately, and then she really has to be very hard, really decisive. Maybe a bit aggressive when she works. And for me, that was something that was really interesting to look for to find different layers of her character.
“For me, those scenes with Milica, with her daughter, they were actually quite challenging, but very rewarding. Because I also had a great actress to work with. We could, in those few minutes, because it's a short movie, bring out this relationship, this humanity of that character.”
There’s a great scene about halfway through where the two play fight on a bed. It adds a lot of energy to the film and presents an interesting contrast with scenes of actual violence. I ask how they approached that.
“We just had fun!” says Nika.
“It's very interesting,” says Tamara, “because maybe we as humans, or the animals in us, we have this instinct to fight. If we look at baby dogs or cats or lions at an early age, they're playfully fighting with each other. And I love that contrast that we have with this. This is maybe another opening, another layer. I'm very interested in things like that: having this contrast of violence to a playful aggression, like they do, and having this aggression that is losing all of the control. Where is it coming from with the demonstration, with the protesters?”
“I think it was important to have this personal aspect,” says Christian. “Of course, on the one side is about journalism and societies and democracies. But on the other side, it was really important to us to tell what it means personally for the life of the journalists. Actually, they're just doing their job, but they have to carry those consequences personally. So that's why those scenes were really important to us to, show that there's not only suffering in the life of the journalists, of course, there's still love and happiness in those moments.
