- - -

Filmmaker Charlie Carrick's Comments:

"With the outbreak of war and subsequent disintegration of Yugoslavia, a great rupture occurred in Nina’s life before she was even born into it. As a small child, Nina moved to Canada to begin a new life among her family and a community of fellow refugees.

In my privileged dual position as the composer’s collaborator and husband, I was granted access to the Platiša family’s home movie archive to source material for this project. That rupture is omnipresent across the tens of hours I watched because the tapes can be separated into two categories: videos recorded in Canada to be sent to family back ‘home’ in former Yugoslavia, and videos from the Balkans chronicling the long summers spent there by Nina and her sister Tamara. The very reason the tapes exist, the reason the video camera has been purchased, is to bridge the fissure opened up by catastrophic events far beyond these people’s control. And yet these tapes are full of joy and life and community; full of strength and bravery and love.

From a director’s perspective, home videos are fascinating in what is revealed through the gaze of the person holding the camera - what they consider important or telling or beautiful. In many of the early tapes, recorded before Nina’s family had a camera of their own, the gaze is that of a family friend. What a gift from him to chronicle these intimate family scenes! What sensitivity to linger on two sisters dancing on the carpeted floor of their first Canadian apartment, on the men smoking in the background of a child’s birthday party, on a tired girl held by her father!

Watching these tapes on the Platišas’ VCR, or sometimes straight from the old camcorder itself, with 2022 Nina in the home we share, time became a flickering helix. It’s a lovely but somehow unsettling sensation to encounter people you’ve known for many years at various stages of the long lives they lived before you knew them. To see how they are the same; how they are different.

In Nina’s piano music too, I feel this collapsing of time and distance. Her music is achingly poignant without being sentimental. It reaches out to the past without nostalgia, somehow conjuring a kind of freedom from what could be powerlessness - the way that life and history blows through each of us like a wind, sometimes powerful and sometimes playful, animating us and making us graceful."

You can see more of Charlie's work here.

Filmmaker Martin Edralin's Comments:

"The video montage features public domain footage of Austronesian-speaking peoples, who are comprised of the ethnic populations of Maritime Southeast Asia, the Pacific Islands, Madagascar, and the Indigenous peoples of Taiwan and Mainland Southeast Asia. The footage was sourced from the Prelinger Archives and set to the music of Nina Platiša who commissioned the project.

I was interested in the imbalance of power between the authors and subjects of the footage, perceivable in the authors’ gaze and the subjects’ “performance”. Working with rights-free footage of peoples under colonial rule, or shortly after independence, prompted me to reflect on the concept of “property” – which was unfamiliar to Indigenous peoples prior to European contact – and the extension of property law to image-making in the form of copyright, intellectual property, and personality rights. Throughout the creative process I contemplated the ethics around ownership and access to the images as well as my own accountability in interpreting and repurposing them.”

You can see more of Martin's work here.

Filmmakers Katarina Šoškić + Pavle Nikolić's Comments:

"Just as I was about to give up contributing to this beautiful project by Nina, due to breaking all the deadlines, tough personal issues, and a lack of vigour, I realized that a walk I took with my friend Pavle was followed by our humming of the composition Za Klavir: No. 6. It stayed with us so much, coloring an ordinary daily activity with such precise overlap of ambience, speed, and sudden joy so that we decided to reenact it, turning it into the scene of our video. In a clumsy, nervous, and even humorous manner, this woman is learning to love herself and is lucky to do it in collaboration with and encouraged by her dear friends. While creating a video for Za Klavir: No. 6, Nina's composition turned into a soundtrack of real life events, whereas Pavle's presence, sensitivity and support, merged with his talent to visualize and edit this film."

You can see more of Katarina's work here.

You can see more of Pavle's work here.

Filmmaker Charlie Carrick's Comments:

"In the recording of home videos, a great many strangers are collaterally swept up into a family’s archived history. While Nina and her sister are the stars of many of these tapes, at the periphery are the intrusions and foibles and sweetnesses of a succession of men and boys, known or unknown, fondly remembered or entirely forgotten. I watched Nina and her sister, growing, changing, becoming themselves, and wondered what they made of all of us silly lads and the silly ways we behave. In a twenty-year-old video documenting a trip to the Montenegrin coast, I was struck by an image of Nina leaving the house on a hill where she and Tamara had spent their vacation, waving back to the camera as her suitcase descended on a rope beside her. But this house on a hill also yielded some intriguing footage of men in the wild, as the gaze of the unknown camera operator roams around the valley below, spying on shirtless soccer players, smoke-breaking waiters, a solitary fisherman. It was this footage that inspired my film for Za Klavir: No. 4, a piece to my ears propelled by this very sense of playful curiosity, like that of a benign ghost, swooping through lives."

You can see more of Charlie's work here.

Filmmaker Igor Drljača's Comments:

"Winter Trails - After listening to Nina’s moving and solemn Za Klavir: No. 7, I was inspired to create this film. It chronicles a winter odyssey in the middle of the omicron pandemic in which Vancouver’s previously busy wintery landscapes – that welcomed hundreds of thousands of tourists a year - became nearly empty playgrounds for the locals. I was moved by the silence, the emptiness, and the vastness of it all, and as someone who had recently moved to Vancouver, I soaked it all. It was a time for reflection as well as a time of heightened anxiety. For many of us this period was also an opportunity to start something new or to rediscover an adventure you kept putting off. I stopped skiing in 2004 after a serious ski injury, and finally, in the winter of 2020 I picked snowboarding, learning to re- embrace the mountains and the snow, and to learn on mostly empty hills. In between my rides up the mountains, I recorded the stillness, the mechanical revs of the ski lifts, and the snow."

You can see more of Igor's work here.

Filmmaker Marija Strajnić's Comments:

"This video represents the exploration of a sensual mezzanine between slowed down movement and a piano composition. Dancers in the video have never heard the music they've been edited into. The cut is as raw as possible so that the visuals can take on the musical atmosphere in its purest form."

You can see more of Marija's work here.