Sarajevo Film Festival: Looking for Horses with Stefan Pavlović
[August 31, 2021] For our third episode dedicated to the 27th edition of the Sarajevo Film Festival, we feature a conversation with Stefan Pavlović whose film, LOOKING FOR HORSES, took home the Special Jury Prize in the documentary competition.
Looking for Horses is Stefan’s first feature-length film and the result of his graduate studies at the Netherlands Film Academy in Artistic Research in and through Cinema titled, From Filming Intimacy to Filming Intimately, where he investigates how the cinema apparatus can overcome the limits of verbal language and how the camera can be a tool to practice intimacy with and through.
Looking For Horses chronicles a growing friendship between the filmmaker who struggles to communicate in his mother tongue due to a heavy stutter, and Zdravko, a fisherman he meets who lost most of his hearing during the Bosnian Civil War. Despite their speech and hearing limitations, a bond develops between the two as they forge a common language.
Facilitating the conversation is Docs in Orbit co-curator Kopal Joshy. Kopal is an Indian filmmaker and cinematographer who is currently in the process of expanding her thesis film from her MA studies in DocNomads into a feature film. In her film, Joshy chronicles her encounters with a man that lives in solitude by a lake in Portugal and engages in similar questions about filmmaking as an intimate act of sharing between two people.
Reference Links:
FESTIVAL SCREENINGS = VdR 2021 | FidMarseille | Sarajevo Film Festival
STEFAN PAVLOVIĆ, FEATURED FILMMAKER
Graduating with honors, Stefan received his BA in Film Directing at Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles. In 2017 he was selected to participate in the documentary film residency Aristoteles Workshop in Romania where he made his third short film WHEN THE DRAGON CAME. The film had its premiere at the Netherlands Film Festival in 2018, followed by its international premiere at the Krakow Film Festival. It would go on to win the Best Film Award at the Szczecin International Film Festival.
Stefan received his MA at the Netherlands Film Academy in Artistic Research in and through Cinema. His research, From Filming Intimacy to Filming Intimately, was nominated for the AHK Best Work Price and the Young Art Fund Amsterdam.
Stefan is currently based in Amsterdam and Looking for Horses is his debut feature-length film.
KOPAL JOSHY, DOCS IN ORBIT CO-CURATOR
Kopal Joshy is an Indian documentary filmmaker and cinematographer currently living in Lisbon, Portugal where she is working on expanding one of her short documentary films into a feature-length with Terratreme Filmes.
Prior to moving to Europe, Kopal spent extensive time in Digital Video Production at Srishti School of Art, Design, and Technology in India. She received multiple scholarships to continue her studies in Europe where she explored photography at Edinburgh College of Arts, Edinburgh, Scotland and a Master of Arts in Documentary Directing through DocNomads where she spent time immersing herself in three different countries (Portugal, Hungary, and Belgium) making films as an Erasmus+ scholarship student.