Lazarus Path

After years of traveling as a street artist, motionless sculpture, Lazar finds himself on a small Mediterranean island. He starts to miss home but his departure from island is complicated by an inability to properly communicate with island’s administration. We follow tiresome work on collecting documents which should enable him to leave. Meetings with administration clerks become more and more peculiar. Their questions go beyond the administrative boundaries and are stepping into the most intimate parts of Lazar’s life. Lazar feels trapped in twisted Kafkian reality while he walks from one to another office of the island’s administration and patiently answers their questions and meets their demands, all the while carrying heavy black box which holds his “complete documentation”. The tedious process of collecting documentation turns into a re-examination life’s meaning and deep secrets hidden from oneself. This story, unusual in its content, reminds us that responsibility comes from the existential fact that life is a chain of questions to which a person must answer by being responsible to himself and others by deciding which answer to give to each individual question, and also that for each question there is only one answer – the true one.

After a completely different career, which included working with marginalized groups of children and young people, partly in postwar zones (Kosovo), after complete burnout - I decided to return to my first love – cinema. I had previous screenwriting experience. I enrolled in a great private film school in Belgrade, ran by two wonderful professors. I made a few shorts and after that produced and filmed The Healing in 2014, a film that took several prizes in different film festivals and still is being screened around the world. After that I worked on a very large documentary project for which I filmed 94 people and edited the film out of 450 hours of material – that was, in a nutshell, the best school of film editing ever. Just before the Covid crisis hit I started with the production of Lazarus Path. I wanted to act as a main producer because I wanted to maintain complete independence when it comes to creative choices. I described my journey with this last film in a series of published film essays in which I objectivize, in a more philosophical manner, the process of filmmaking. I strongly believe in the irreplaceability of talent, in the capability to think outside of the box during the process, and in solid education when it comes to knowing other forms of art (painting, literature, music) that contribute to developing a unique world of film. The film is syncretic, good films are made from the wholeness of the author’s experience - so the film is much more than the craft you can learn in any school.