Nenad Puhovski: Together

Energetic festival director (ZagrebDOX) and producer (Factum) Nenad Puhovski is also a film director, and a very committed one. With his new film he has for years been following people who – with his words – ”were, are or wish to be emotionally engaged with others”. They are very different, but they all want to be together with another person. Their differences and communication skills are reflected in the way the film comes out stylistically. With some characters the director puts up the camera and waits for good moments to happen, with others who could be mentally challenged, he has to put questions to get answers on how Love came to them. It makes the film a bit unbalanced with an intercut editing that goes from one story to the other, and then to yet another one. There are five stories in the film, they each have their own atmosphere, one could call it ”colour” – also emphasized through the use of different music elements.

Having said so, some of the stories sit strong with the viewer. For me the story with the lesbian couple goes close and develops into a touching small drama. Here you sense an intimacy that you can only get if you as a director knows your approach and has achieved the confidence and the respect of both young women in the couple. Some other wordless scenes work fine in terms of rythm and metaphor for happiness – like the one where a couple (those on the photo) do a bed together, or the scene with the widow who are at the cemetery, or the fine scenes with the man in the wheelchair, who challenges the viewer with his direct language: We all fuck!

Truffaut said that if nine out of ten films were about Love, it was one too little. I would not mind if Puhovski goes back to one of the couples and see how it goes og does not go. We can all learn from that!

Croatia, 2009, 87 mins.

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Tue Steen Müller
Tue Steen Müller

Müller, Tue Steen
Documentary Consultant and Critic, DENMARK

Worked with documentary films for more than 20 years at the Danish Film Board, as press officer, festival representative and film consultant/commissioner. Co-founder of Balticum Film and TV Festival, Filmkontakt Nord, Documentary of the EU and EDN (European Documentary Network).
Awards: 2004 the Danish Roos Prize for his contribution to the Danish and European documentary culture. 2006 an award for promoting Portuguese documentaries. 2014 he received the EDN Award “for an outstanding contribution to the development of the European documentary culture”. 2016 The Cross of the Knight of the Order for Merits to Lithuania. 2019 a Big Stamp at the 15th edition of ZagrebDox. 2021 receipt of the highest state decoration, Order of the Three Stars, Fourth Class, for the significant contribution to the development and promotion of Latvian documentary cinema outside Latvia. In 2022 he received an honorary award at DocsBarcelona’s 25th edition having served as organizer and programmer since the start of the festival.
From 1996 until 2005 he was the first director of EDN (European Documentary Network). From 2006 a freelance consultant and teacher in workshops like Ex Oriente, DocsBarcelona, Archidoc, Documentary Campus, Storydoc, Baltic Sea Forum, Black Sea DocStories, Caucadoc, CinéDOC Tbilisi, Docudays Kiev, Dealing With the Past Sarajevo FF as well as programme consultant for the festivals Magnificent7 in Belgrade, DOCSBarcelona, Verzio Budapest, Message2Man in St. Petersburg and DOKLeipzig. Teaches at the Zelig Documentary School in Bolzano Italy.

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