Body

How did you and Urška meet?

We met in a Ljubljana bar when we were about 16 or 17. She was waiting tables there, and by then she had already left home. We both attended an experimental theatre school and that's where we clicked. There was also Tita, who appears in the film in the maternity ward scene. The three of us were very tight as we all grew up in messed up, complicated families. We rebelled with our strange haircuts and transgressive clothing, we basically screamed for attention because we preferred to be attacked and shouted at than to keep talking about the painful things we were experiencing at home. That must have been why we bonded so strongly, and we still have this bond to this day. But Urška's teenage years were particularly difficult for her.

You have been shooting with Urška for many years, on and off. When did you realise you had a film?

When Urška first came with Zoja to Macedonia in 2005, it was in order to escape Slovenia and her problems so we went to Lake Prespa to relax. She had wanted to stay for a week and ended up staying almost two months. She'd left all her problems behind, before that she was living with Zoja at the student campus as a single mother.

After swimming in Prespa, Urška got an infection and went back to Ljubljana. A few weeks passed and then Urška's sister called to tell us she was in a coma for six days. The scenes at Prespa were filmed only two weeks before the ones in the Ljubljana hospital.

I think I realised I could make a film when she had started walking again the first time she was hospitalised. I kept asking her to keep filming, but she kept refusing. Five years after her second collapse, at one point she suddenly called me on the phone and I heard her playing the piano. She was so thrilled she could play again, she invited me to come over and shoot. She realised that making of this film was also a sort of therapy for her, that it will help her understand what it was that happened to her. That was the key moment when I knew we had a film.

Can you tell us a bit about the healer, Mitko Filev, who appears in the film the first time she is in the hospital?

Actually these scenes were shot for a film about Mitko that I was making at the time, but which I never finished. On the eleventh day of Urška's coma, it was a critical situation. No fewer than 45 doctors had looked at her and they gave her a high-grade corticosteroid therapy but nothing helped. That's when I called Mitko. He started working with her remotely, and she woke up. It could be a coincidence, but it's a fact that it happened when he started working with her.

What comes out in those hospital scenes, but also throughout the film, is Urška's incredible positivity, she keeps laughing and making jokes.

She's had so many disasters in her life, from her parents who abused her to everything that happened later, but she has this eternal, invincible laughter. In fact, in the editing we had to tone it down and throw some of it out, because she keeps clowning around. I'm sure it's this defensive mechanism that kept her alive. She's simply like that. She is able to laugh at the most difficult things, her hospital stories are a total crack-up. That's why we had her read her diary in the voice-over, so that she could get into her deep, intimate issues.

“I wanted viewers to really feel it physically because it's something that words can't capture.”

How did you and Urška work together, and especially how did you develop these oneiric, nightmarish scenes that accompany her voice-over?

We started from Urška's diary and we used it to single out the key themes. I really needed her to work with me on the script because I wouldn't have been able to write how she felt, it had to be her. I would always consult her or even she would write some pieces that would end up in the treatment, but she never wanted to interfere in the film itself.

I wanted the viewer to feel physically as if they went inside the body and felt what Urška was feeling, all those pains and uncertainties. I was wondering how to enter this world and bring the audience into it. We tried to achieve it through music and sound design, together with composer and sound designer Vladimir Rakić. I wanted viewers to really feel it physically because it's something that words can't capture. It is a state between dreams, reality and the damage done by the illness and drugs. It takes a lot of energy to pull yourself out of it and to get back into the normal world, I find that extremely fascinating.

The visuals are pretty abstract because I didn't want to repeat what she says in the voice-over. We tried to represent the body on the cellular level, something that the audience travels through. It's a mix of microscopic images of cells and underwater scenes with the fish. These are actually arapaima fish from the Amazon that we shot in the Leipzig Zoo. They are so ugly that they are beautiful to me, I loved them. They fit perfectly what I imagined as a kid was on the bottom of the lake so I wanted them to represent her deepest fears.

Water is a very important element in the film: the film starts and ends at Lake Prespa, with 15 years passing in between.

We wanted to go back to Prespa because Urška had always been afraid of it. That's when she first told me on camera that she had wanted to commit suicide. I had no idea.

At one point she went to swim to the island which is 7.5 km away. She is a swimmer, and her relationship with water seems very natural, it seems like it is cleansing her. But in fact, water keeps pulling her down until she reaches the island. It is very symbolic, but back then I didn't see this connection clearly. Her subconscious, her family issues, her sexuality: all of this is pulling her down, drowning her. This murky lake water is actually illness, until she reaches the island, which in a way reconciles her with all these issues. She has found an inner balance there and when she swims back, there is no murkiness, we only film her on the surface, with birds flying above.

For me, the water means both illness and her subconscious that is drowning her, but on the other hand, when she opens up to me on camera, she releases all the horrors and, in a way, heals herself. It may sound preposterous, but it is a fact that since then she has been completely healthy. She still suffers consequences of all the strong drugs she had been taking for therapy for years, and when she stopped chemotherapy, she realised her body was not what it used to be and never will be. For a woman, this is very difficult, but she has accepted it, she has survived and she will keep living.