CinéDialoog: Looking for Horses

Taking the shape of a gentle western, Looking for Horses is a poetic documentary on trauma, survival and connection.

Looking for Horses is about the friendship between the filmmaker and a fisherman, who lost his hearing during the Bosnian civil war and retreated to a lake to live in solitude. The filmmaker, son of Bosnian parents, struggles to communicate as he lost his mother-tongue due to a heavy stutter. Despite their speech and hearing limitations, a bond develops between the young man and the veteran, as he shares his world of the lake: full of large catfish, wild horses, wide silences, and dangerous thunderstorms. Where for the fisherman the lake stands for a withdrawal from a fractured country, a land of war; for the filmmaker it precisely means the return to that broken place, the land of his parents. They look for ways to communicate, while the camera mediates their growing bond.

After the screening we engage in a conversation with the director Stefan Pavlović and Menno Otten, a Dutch filmmaker, to discuss their approaches to filmmaking and the practical, moral and artistic challenges they face in their work.