On the Ties that Last, Gestures that Remain, and the Wind that still Talks to Us: The Wind Family 

When we face a loss, whether as children or adults, we rarely understand what it means to leave, or what it means to stay. We don’t understand that someone may be gone, and yet remain everywhere. As children, we are often shielded from pain. Not because it isn’t there, but because adults believe that sparing us from suffering would preserve our innocence. Pain is pushed aside, into the kitchen, sorrow is masked with a loud “everything’s going to be fine”, and “death” is uttered quietly, as if the word itself can do harm. Some face loss for the first time only later in life, like a wall suddenly rising where only yesterday there was air. Others live with it daily, as with something that gets hushed over time, but never truly disappears. This is the space the film “Wind, Talk to Me” inhabits. Perhaps this is why it feels so intimate, as it does not depict death as an event, but explores loss as a state of being.  

In my case, this story is not merely a film. As one of my primary school teachers, Negrica Djordjevic was a part of my childhood. The voice I once heard in the classroom, I heard again in the film, and from that moment onward, I was no longer witnessing someone else’s story, but watching a circle close in a place I had not known existed.  

Stefan Djordjevic began documenting his mother’s story not out of cinematic ambition, but from an urge to keep her spirit close. His mother’s fight with cancer, her decision to refuse conventional treatment and turn to nature, alternative methods, turning inward, toward her own body, all of it feels at once frightening and magnificent. When someone you love chooses a path you would not choose for them, you oscillate between respect and panic, between understanding and helplessness. The first time, it seemed like a miracle. Fifteen years later, when the disease returned, his mother once again believed that life may be reclaimed by drawing closer to life itself. She bought a camper trailer at Lake Bor and decided to spend her days in nature, in a rhythm not dictated by the system, but by water, trees and wind.  

There is something in this decision that turned the film from documentary into poetry. This was also how the photographs shown in the exhibition titled “The Wind Family” were created. Stefan was initially taking photos, as if he first had to learn how to see before he could begin filming. These photographs do not contain grand scenes or pathos. Everything is close, warm, corporeal. Later, when he began filming, the film ceased to be a portrait and became a conversation, an attempt to hold on to what was still there, rather than simply tell a story. After the mother’s death, the family gathered around her absence, and the film was freed from chronology. There is no clear “then” and “now”, because loss knows no such distinction. The person is still there, in people, in words, in habits, humor, silence. 

Thus in the film, and also in the photos, nature is not a backdrop, but a companion. The wind is not a metaphor that is “explained”, but a practice, a way of suggesting that there are conversations not made of words. Stefan recounts the loneliest period of his life after his mother’s death, when he hugged trees. It may sound funny, and perhaps it is a little, but it is also the most accurate description of the craving for touch once someone is gone. Touch becomes both a question and longing, an attempt to find something solid to rest your pain against. In these details, the film remains human. It does not turn suffering into a monument, but lets humor in, because families do not only cry, they also laugh, even in hard times, and often exactly then.  

Then there is the dog. In these photographs, she is a warm constant. The relationship with the dog becomes a story of care and mutuality, of the need to give care when it no longer has a place to land. Stefan often says that Lija in a way cared for him too. After loss, life often returns through care, through getting up, walking, feeding, spending time outside. As if something gently pulls you out of yourself. “Wind Family” exhibition depicts this cycle in its entirety. It holds life, illness, closeness, sorrow, burial, and what comes after. Here we see children growing up, adults growing older, houses that remember, beds that have been slept in, tables where meals are served, landscapes that hold one’s silence.  

When I left the cinema after the screening, I felt an overwhelming urge to call my parents and tell them I loved them. It was never easier to cry in a room packed with strangers. It was even liberating. As if we all, at least for a moment, admitted to each other what we usually hide: that we remain children, even as adults, that we carry the fear of loss even after we have faced it, that we share the same need to say “I’m here” to someone. 

This exhibition does not exist to explain the film, but to reveal its texture. To show that sorrow is not only an emotion, but also a world, a backyard, a lake, the shade of a tree, hands, sun-touched flesh, evening skies, a dog approaching, a family that sits in silence. These photographs are not souvenirs of the film. They are evidence that the film was made of life, and that life continues despite loss. And perhaps “Wind, Talk to Me” is not a film about death, and “Wind Family” is not an exhibition about the film, but about connection: about the presence that doesn’t end with departure, that those who are gone continue, somehow, through us. And that, when we lose someone, the wind becomes one way of hearing them still. 

Katarina Kostandinovic

Art historian