Wind, Talk to Me
aka Vetre, pričaj sa mnom First screened and reviewed in October 2025
Director: Stefan Đorđević. Cast: Stefan Đorđević, Negrica Đorđević, Bosko Đorđević, Budimir Jovanović, Ljilijana Jovanović, Đorđe davidović. Screenplay: Stefan Đorđević. In Brief:
Slow pace, glassy surface are discouragements but contribute to brave, layered, and deepening immersion in grief.
VOR:④
Unusually committed to its own rigorous grammar and to the auto-ethnographic involvement of a real family in mourning. Inventive and vulnerable.
I find Stefan Đorđević's Wind, Talk to Me easier to appreciate a day later. The nature and logic of its formal strategies accumulate over time, and with them the emotional payoffs of what is unfolding (but also not budging, and also remaining in some ways inchoate) among the grieving filmmaker and his extended family members, all of whom appear as themselves in a contrived scenario with inextricable bonds to actual life and actual death. I haven't seen Tarkovsky's Mirror in a quarter-century, but I recall, perhaps erroneously, a similar tonal register and a tension between one part absorption and two parts struggle in my initial relationship to it. Wind, Talk to Me is like Mirror, or my memory of Mirror, played at about three-quarter speed, with everything enveloping and alienating that might imply.
It makes sense to me that Wind's slow, steadily build would only continue in the 24 hours after I saw the movie. At the same time, I have to admit that it also helps to be released (I almost wrote "at last") from Đorđević's glassy-surfaced and long-held images, which often seem premised in design and duration on withholding information or even involvement. This film is slowish even by slow-cinema standards, and I experienced waves of everything from empathy to exasperation at irregular intervals during its 100 minutes—though that in itself, I feel sure, is part of its artistic design. I don't think the impetus or the sensorium of the movie would suffer with just a little relenting on Wind's austere tempo and style, even as I concede that all of these choices are endemic to what the film is, to its notion of grief, and to how the movie "says" what it "says" in its hurt, tentative, predominantly nonverbal way. I sometimes found Wind, Talk to Me frustratingly inexpressive, but the possibility is wide open that this very reaction suggests that Đorđević expressed exactly what he wanted.
Amid the overall ambience I've described are some moments of purer insight into personality and feeling, as clear as ice water, and as balanced between refreshment and chill. Many of these involve Đorđević's late mother, preserved in footage of a movie he was making about her when she passed; his 80-year-old grandmother, stoic and stilled by her mourning for her daughter, but possessed of her own internal spark of taciturn warmth; and a dog who accidentally and in rough fashion joins the family early in the film. I'm not at all convinced this dog profited from being involved in Đorđević's movie; the sense of an animal being put through more than her due sometimes amplified the feeling that Djorđević is also a little bit hard on his kin and his audience. I was frankly glad when she released herself and heard a whisper of SOS in her final, powerfully framed closeup. But Wind, Talk to Me takes self-conscious stock of these dynamics, too—Đorđević sees a lot, including about himself, while seeming relentlessly and sometimes selfishly focused on a few, stalwart preoccupations.
The ratios I described above between absorbed and alienated spectatorship flipped over the runtime. By the end of Wind, Talk to Me, I was pretty well inside the film and grateful for its (sometimes literally) dogged commitment, and what that tenacity made possible. The final sequence with the late mother, Negrica, as well as the closing image are likely to be high on the list of indelible memories I take away from the dozens of movies I'll see at this festival. The movie as a whole may even sink in deeper and deeper, and my respect may only increase, even if I'm not sure I will prioritize a second viewing. (I might soon have another go at Mirror, though.) Judging a movie like this, which isn't just about grief but works hard to embody it, by and for the very people in the sludgy thick of it, feels uncomfortable close to judging grief itself or people's approach to it—a mistake, way more often than not. I periodically found this film stingy toward its spectators and even a few of its participants, but I'm discovering inside that stinginess a considerable well of generosity. Grade:B+
