SOUND BEFORE SOUND: Interstitial Sound Field of Fiddling Practice
Sound Before Sound (13’01’’), created in collaboration with Branislav Stevanović, is an experimental ethnographic film that examines the sonic landscape of fiddling traditions. Moving away from conventional ethnomusicological approaches, such as interviews or staged performance documentation, the film adopts the soundscape as its primary mode of inquiry.
Filmed and composed through a combination of scientific observation and experimental audiovisual methods, the work focuses on what is often overlooked: the interstitial sounds that exist between structured music and environmental noise. What we hear are the processes of instrument-making itself, the cutting and sanding of wood, the carving of lines, the rhythmic operations of machines used in shaping it. These sounds are not positioned as background, but as integral to the practice of sound-making, documenting the labor and material transformations that precede performance.
By foregrounding these processes, the film challenges conventional distinctions between music and noise and expands the ethnographic field of listening. Sound Before Sound demonstrates that tradition is not confined to the final act of performance but is also embedded in the preparatory gestures, environments, and acoustic residues that surround it.
The film was included in the official selection of the 69th Martovski Festival – Belgrade Documentary and Short Film Festival, in the category of documentary films up to 50 minutes.
THE GREAT SCHOOL CLASS: Lessons from the Forest
In collaboration with poet Aleksandar Šurbatović and composer Matija Anđelković, I created a 41-minute film that brings to life Lessons from the Forest, a poem and composition originally performed at the 2019 Great School Class manifestation.
The work was filmed in Šumarice Memorial Park, a site that carries the weight of memory and grief. The park stands on the grounds where the Kragujevac massacre took place in October 1941, when over 30,000 civilians were rounded up by occupying forces and thousands executed in retaliation. Among them were 2,264 people shot on October 21, including schoolchildren, teachers, and entire families.
This project approaches the tragedy not through direct reenactment but through a dialogue between poetry, music, and moving images. The forest itself becomes a witness, a living archive in which history echoes and silence speaks.
At 41 minutes, the film approximates the length of a school class. The slight incompleteness resonates with the very subject of the work: lessons interrupted, lives unfinished, time cut short.
At its core, The Great School Class seeks to preserve memory while questioning how trauma is carried forward across generations. By combining artistic disciplines, the film aims to blur the line between commemoration and creation, turning remembrance into an active, shared experience rather than a passive ritual.
Orchestra: VIS Nebograd I Production: “Kragujevac October” Memorial Park; City of Kragujevac; Radio Television Serbia
ANTICIPATION: Children's Wishes
Anticipation is a fundamental part of childhood, a state of being that fuses imagination with feeling. It is the restless wait before a gift is opened, the thrill of looking forward to a game, but also the quiet hope for a tomorrow that feels safer and brighter. To anticipate is to lean into the future, to live inside possibility.
This two-minute documentary, filmed at a shelter in Krfska Street, turns its attention to children whose lives are marked by instability yet still infused with this capacity to dream. In their voices, we hear both the ordinary and the essential: the wish to become a football player, a teacher, a baker, or simply to have a home. These declarations of hope become a testament to their resilience and their refusal to let circumstance dictate the boundaries of their imagination.
The children cover their faces with their hands throughout the film, a gesture I suggested, but one they embraced as their own. This act of self-censorship is also an act of agency: by hiding their faces, they decide how they will be seen. They deny us the comfort of gazing upon their vulnerability and instead direct our attention to their words. What might appear as absence is in fact presence; what seems like concealment becomes empowerment.
Anticipation: Children’s Wishes asks us to listen rather than look, to measure the weight of a child’s desire for future against the fragility of their present. It reminds us that anticipation is not simply waiting, it is a form of survival, a radical insistence on tomorrow.