“Speak So I Can See You”
SAFF 2021 Award Winner
Conjuring reality and wonder, “Speak so I Can See You” takes us to a seemingly different era, by exploring the world of Radio Belgrade. One of Europe’s oldest radio stations and a true institution of the city, the station still broadcasts original programming and helps keep history, culture and critical thought, as well as ever- relevant questions about ourselves and the world, from slipping out of memory and mind. Set at the intersection of an observational documentary and a unique sensory experience, the film conjures everyday scenes at the station and immersing interludes exploring the relationship between sound and the space it inhabits. Through a synesthetic blend of sounds, words, notes, echoes and light, we are taken into a unique cinematic soundscape that doubles as a love letter to radiophonic art and its disarming insight into what makes us remember, understand, think, discover, and feel.
Director Biography
Marija directs films that blur borders between documentary and fiction and treats her narratives
as a non-linear, complex and fragmented. She is
The New School for Media Studies in New York and Academy of Arts in Belgrade alumna. Her recent projects focus on cultural heritage, ancestral music and experimental sound, an interest derived from her background in music as a traditional Serbian music vocalist.
In 2016, Marija founded production house Bilboke
in Serbia. She is a guest lecturer and a member of DokSerbia, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellow in category Film/Video for 2015 and Instituto Sacatar in Brazil fellow for 2017 in the same category. Since September 2019, together with producers Andrijana Sofranić and Miloš Ivanović, she’s been running SET SAIL FILMS, a film company in Belgrade.
Director’s Statement
In almost a century-long history of Radio Belgrade, no similar creative documentary has been made about this institution or its listeners. I first discovered its inner world as a student, in my frequent visits to Radio Belgrade’s Drama department, only to return
to it, many years later, as an avid listener, astounded by the effect that the radiophonic sound had on my perception of everyday life, my physical surroundings and my thinking processes.
Through personal artistic rendering, I wanted
to present the Radio, not only as a laboratory of sound, but as a living source of creative thought
and intergenerational memory. Further, I wanted to examine the synesthetic quality of the radiophonic sound and to understand the complex layers of information it embodies and its significance in contemporary life.
On a regional level this film has an additional meaning: Throughout the turbulent history of the region, including the media blackout in the ’90s,
this station has managed to thrive as one-of-a-kind bastion of culture and critical thinking, and to survive censorship, simply because its critique has been done discreetly - through art. In today’s political and public life, very little importance is given to culture and art, while these can change the consciousness of people and provoke major social and political changes.
In my directing approach, observation is combined with experimental elements, play with light, unconventionally composed shots or extreme angles, to expand the spatiality of sound. The
visual playfulness invites the viewer to discover the relationship between sound and the space it inhabits. In editing, we create an interchangeable dynamics between the sonic and visual dimensions of the film, sometimes juxtaposing sound to a comprehensible or abstract image, sometimes leaving it in complete darkness and allowing the viewers to place the sound they hear into their immediate surroundings, outside of the movie screen.
Through intuitive yet precise dramaturgy, the film seeks to reflect on the present moment through the inner logic of one timeless being.