When they were teenagers in Ljubljana (Slovenia), filmmaker Petra Seliškar and her friend Urška were young punks together. They first ran into each other at an alternative theatre school when they were 15 or 16 and quickly became as thick as thieves.
“We met because we were…different. This was the end of [the former] Yugoslavia and the city itself was quite rich in culture. There were a lot of concerts going on. We went to all these alternative underground places.”
Urška was to become a model and pianist. Seliškar was soon to establish herself as a leading documentary maker with her company Peter Pan.
Seliškar chronicled many of their experiences together on film. She had been working for an advertising company who would lend her their DV camera to do casting for commercials. “I had access to this camera and so I could shoot some of our craziness, when we were going out,” the director recalls. “I had blue hair and she had shaved hair at that time.”
People would stop the young women on the streets. Locals were suspicious and disapproving. “You’re supposed to be a decent girl, what is wrong with you?” strangers would say to them. This just brought the two friends even closer together. All the while Seliškar was shooting “private, personal” footage of their antics together, but never thought she would use it in a film.
As the years passed. Seliškar stored her old mini-DV tapes in her parents’ attic. She says today that “it is quite a miracle” that she didn’t lose the material. “I was travelling a lot later on. I lost most of my photography from the period. [But] I think was over-protective of the footage. Anything that was on tapes was valuable to me…even in a chaotic period, I kept it. I found also footage of old fashion shows where she was modelling.”
There is however a tragic undertow to Seliškar’s documentary. Body was made in response to a terrible event which befell Urška, She was struck down by auto-immune disease. She went into a coma. Her limbs betrayed her. For a period, she couldn’t even walk without support.
The director deals with her subject’s battle to recover her health in deliberately impressionistic fashion. There aren’t subtitles to explain what is happening. Seliškar included “as little information as possible connected to time, to the what and where.”
Instead, she relies on Urška’s diary and on her voice-over. “I tried to focus on the inner development of her disease…her inner struggle and what really happened to her body.”
Urška had a difficult relationship with her family who treated her cruelly and indifferently. The director struggled in vain to discover why “the parents were so mean” to Urška. They had two other children whom they treated far more kindly. The documentary makes only fleeting reference to this. Its focus is always Urška herself.
“Try to imagine. She reached the lowest part of her life with the first disease. Then she realises that after the lowest point, there is even a deeper dark chamber – and she had to find a way to bring herself up.”
Seliškar was there with her camera, recording her friend’s health and emotional struggles but Urška nevertheless remained resilient and cheerful. “I think the humour we had when we were 15 didn’t change.” Urška still had the ability to laugh in the face of misfortune, just as she had done when she and Seliškar were teenagers. “From something dark and terrible, we would make fun of ourselves because it was easier to live like that. Even when she was at the lowest point, I never had the feeling she was suicidal,” says Seliškar.
The jokes that Urška used to make “were so sharp” that sometimes people were taken aback. Humour was her self-defence, but also her way “to keep going.”
The documentary includes footage from a mountain lake in Macedonia. This is a bird sanctuary. The two friends used to come here often. In the lake, there is an island which has one of the biggest concentration of snakes in the world. ”It’s a piece of Macedonia that is really untouched,” the director says of an idyllic place where they had many happy moments – but also where Urška’s disease began to develop.
This wasn’t an easy film to get going. “No-one wanted to finance a film about disease,” the director remembers. “We applied many times to different funders. They said ‘who wants to make a film about illness?’ I said, ‘it’s the opposite. It’s a manual for survival and how you swim out of auto-immunity and don’t feel miserable.’ They simply didn’t get it.’”
The Covid epidemic seemed to change attitudes toward depicting illness on film. The documentary suddenly seemed very timely and, gradually, funders did come aboard. The Slovenian Film Centre, The Croatian Audiovisual Centre, North Macedonia Film Agency, Region Cote D’Azur, Eurimages and Creative Europe Media all threw their weight behind the film. Lightdox took on world sales.
Body premiered in Sarajevo last week and receives its Macedonian premiere at MakeDox on Monday August 21.
Now, the director is closed to completing yet another documentary. Land Of Sar, about a family of shepherds high in the Sar Mountains, a range that extends from southern Kosovo to northwestern North Macedonia.The prolific Seliškar has other projects in development too – but for the next few weeks her focus will be on Body…her poetic and intimate tribute to one of her oldest and dearest friends.
