Camera Lucida: Music – both diegetic and non-diegetic – is almost a distinct protagonist of the narrative. Sound design is impeccable, as if to underline the process of the aural film experience, simultaneously drawing greater attention to the heroine’s hearing impairment.
Sonja Prosenc: We had put a lot of work into sound design of this film, with music playing an important part of the soundscape. At some points - as the one you mentioned- sound is used for creating a tactile experience, or to draw attention to Iva’s hearing impairment through her subjective point of view, sometimes to create a similar experience of hearing and isolation in underwater shots. On other occasions, sound works for the narrative as it connects the parts that could be perceived as past and present, into a meandering of events, memories and thoughts, with shots or sequences echoing variations and details.

Camera Lucida: You offer a new, not only narrative, but poetic solution in film-making, by breaking the linear predictable narrative. Would you call, if anything, your films as anti-narrative?
Sonja Prosenc: There are many films that don’t follow linear predictable narrative. But it is true this is not part of the mainstream or dominant filmmaking canon. In History and in The Tree there is a story that I use mostly as a framework, but the structure is not chronological because this serves a particular purpose.

Camera Lucida: In Ljubezen, the first scenes are of water dripping down a car’s window, drowning-like movements, and a deer appearing from nowhere on the road at dawn. How did you film that scene?
Sonja Prosenc: The filming itself is not so poetic. It is planned to detail, but of course there are always things that you cannot predict. You can just open up space and opportunity for those unpredicted events that can bring something beautiful to the film. In History, on the one hand we very carefully planned everything and were quite systematic, but on the other hand within this frame we opened up space for surprises or we tried to create circumstances where ‘surprises’ that would work in the context of the scene could happen.

Camera Lucida: The first scene in The Tree is of Veli’s beautifully filmed steps walking to bury the dead bird he found on the soil. The connection with nature and animals is something the humans have forgotten?
Sonja Prosenc:I don’t want to be moralistic, but I think this is something we definitely need. In Veli’s scene, it was also about how the soil that we walk on defines us. Yes, it is about connection.

Camera Lucida: Are you hinting that the history of love is a violent one?
Sonja Prosenc: There is a mythological dimension to this. It can manifest through many different kinds of emotions and feelings, very pure ones or sometimes those from the other edge of the spectrum that can even be pathological. The title was never about the romantic concept of love, where a woman is a muse to a man. It is about human beings who enter into different kind of relationships as equals but from different emotional and psychological standing points.

Camera Lucida: Why is the mother’s lover a foreigner (in the Slovenian context), brilliantly played by Norweigian actor Kristoffer Joner?
Sonja Prosenc: Iva and her mother’s lover only have one thing in common. The person they loved and the loss. They don’t share personal history, they don’t even share the environment they come from, but they share an experience, the human condition. This is what I find important, this is what connects us all. It’s inclusive. The more banal reason for him being from abroad is that his character is an orchestra conductor and in Slovenia national philharmonic orchestra conductors usually come from abroad.

Camera Lucida: Family tragedy is central to both films, but while in The Tree, death is threatening all characters until the very end, in History of love, it is the death of one person/mother haunting all the characters…
Sonja Prosenc: In both films we see characters dealing with a traumatic situation or experience. Each one of them has a different way of dealing with it. In my first film The Tree, I focused on three distinct forms of imprisonment – physical, within a system, and by our own feelings of guilt – through three different characters. The first part is Veli, an 8-year-old, who experiences it mostly as a physical entrapment, the family is only safe in a house and yard, surrounded by a tall wall. Second part of the film belongs to Milena, the mother of two boys and the head of the family, and is focused on imprisonment into social system and its sometimes absurd and damaging rules. The third part of the film shows Alek, the older brother. His part is marked by imprisonment in his own feelings of responsibility and guilt. In History of Love the characters are trying to escape the pain of loss, so much so that they are completely detached from each other and alienated from themselves. They almost become nothing more than bodies of grief. But there is the need to overcome this, the need to connect, to understand.

Camera Lucida: The underlying topic of your films could be said to be the complexity of human relationships and disconnected families?
Sonja Prosenc: I would say complexity of the human condition, events that define us, the way we respond to them, and yes, the complexity of relationships.

Camera Lucida: You could also go as far as to say that the underlying theme in both films is revenge – or an impulse for revenge, more subtly and less directly conveyed in History of love. Are love and revenge so closely knit, as eros and thanatos?
Sonja Prosenc: Related to this subject in History of Love we have two responses to the same event; one with Iva, who over the course of the film comes to the point of understanding, or at least accepting that there are some things she doesn’t understand and she stops judging, and the other one with her brother Gregor who cannot overcome his urge to revenge. In these scenes eros and thanatos through love and revenge are closely knit, and we flow between the two till the end of the film.

Camera Lucida: The beautiful moment, in the first part of The Tree, is when Veli tells a bedtime story to his mother. But you use the voice-over as mother and son are curled up in bed together as if to draw attention to the unreliable nature of the narrator?
Sonja Prosenc: The way I thought about this moment is that it has been repeating itself many times; it doesn’t have to be spoken out loud anymore. Cyclic time - it goes by, but it doesn’t progress. The waiting. Also when we hear the story not coming from Veli or mother, but as an omnipresent narrator while we can see how two different people experience it differently, it carries different meanings and implications for each of them.

Camera Lucida: The Tree underscores the tense feeling of claustrophobia, creating in the viewer’s mind a sort of tension that s/he can’t escape, mirroring the film reality. Why is the theme of isolation and, consequently of repressed anger, so important to you?
Sonja Prosenc: With Mitja we were working on a project that was supposed to be a documentary photography project about the tradition of blood feud. When we heard and read more and more stories stories we were struck by them and decided to do a documentary film. But eventually, being overwhelmed by the thought of children living and growing up in captivity we focused on this moment of imprisonment, as before-mentioned, in three different forms, I wanted not to tell those stories in a documentary, but create and make a portrait of certain emotional and psychological states.

Camera Lucida: In the fantasy/reality blur of The Tree, the actual reason for the family exile remains secondary, but you choose the Albanian language and (mixed) family? Why? Is the theme of blood revenge/vendetta crucial for this linguistic/cultural choice?
Sonja Prosenc: The language and the milieu stayed here from the initial idea of a documentary, although the film itself is abstract in the sense of space and time.

Camera Lucida: The red colour, the blood, is even more present in History of love. Blood evokes family blood relations but also violence, which does happen. Does this ‘organic’ dimension add to the thriller element?
Sonja Prosenc: I think the thriller element derives from the atmosphere of films where characters are being haunted by their inner demons or sometime outside circumstances. Not in a sense of a genre.

Camera Lucida: Your films demand not only attention but also intelligence from an active viewer, as opposed to the passive viewer used to film junk food. What do you think of the film art today?
Sonja Prosenc: I often feel that when you make a film that doesn’t fall into the realm of entertainment, or a film that doesn’t follow the dominant canon of film form, you have to almost apologize for its existence. The unwritten demand that the film, also art film, be sellable, maybe even widely sellable, is becoming stronger, not only through sales agents, but increasingly also through festivals. And since we all want to be “loved”, a question occurs: how does this commodification affect filmmakers and their decisions about what kind of films they make.

Camera Lucida: Godard’s statement: “A story should have a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order” mirrors your filmmaking. How would you define a ‘story’ in your filmmaking?
Sonja Prosenc: When I was thinking about the beginning of History, I wanted it to feel like an ending (of something), a goodbye, a farewell. An exhale in the beginning of the film. The mother’s death. This thought also defined my choice of music for the opening scene. And the film ending is really a beginning. Iva’s inhale, that the film ends with. In The Tree this is even much more structured. We have three very defined parts, a beginning, a middle and an end, but not in that order. I see a story only as one of the aspects of the film; it can be used in many different ways when creating a film experience.

Camera Lucida: Who/what are your artistic/cultural influences?
Sonja Prosenc: Now when I hear the question and I think about it I would say Susan Sontag influenced me a lot. Her writings were the first push towards sceptical thinking about things that I took as self-evident till then. Her essays opened my eyes to different perspective on art and on the perception of art. The other important person was my university mentor, poet and academic Aleš Debeljak. He in a way gave me knowledge and courage to think and work outside the box.

Camera Lucida: Considering the shamefully low percentage of women directors in the world (with the percentage of women writers and producers slightly higher) – similarly to Black, Asian or other ethnic/racial groups, does it mean that we see the world through the eyes of a dominant minority, i.e. a small percentage of film representatives, usually white hetero male authors?
Sonja Prosenc: Films don’t only reflect reality but play a role in construction of it. I will tell you my own experience form the time when I started in filmmaking. At one point at the beginning of my work in film I realised that my main protagonists were male. This was not a conscious decision, it was just that predominantly in films main characters were male and this is what I was indoctrinated into. This is why we need to have debates about the issue, we need to put attention to it. We need to raise awareness.

Camera Lucida: Can the current gender dynamics in our reality be changed by making different films, by telling different (non)stories, not by adopting necessarily a “female gaze”, but by adopting a 3^rd gaze, so called “oppositional gaze”, in Teresa de Lauretis’ terms?
Sonja Prosenc: If texts can reaffirm stereotypes and reproduce current status of the society they can also have the opposite effect. But is not enough to make ‘different’ films. The important thing here is to get them to the audience. A few months ago I read a statistics that 15% of films globally are directed by women directors. Gatekeepers that decide which of those films will reach the audience, namely festival selectors and cinema distributors, drop this share to 3%. Things are improving on the side of financiers, and institutions and programs like Eurimages and EWA recommend guidelines for national funding bodies and others. But things also have to improve in this last step. We also need film education, education against unconscious bias, to teach inclusivity (of views) instead of the dominant film narrative rule(s) being the only right.

Camera Lucida: How will this be possible after decades of the audience’s identification with mainstream narrative heroes? In other words, will many more decades be necessary to “undo’ the viewer’s viewing processes and habits?
Sonja Prosenc: If we look at #metoo movement and the optimism that we all felt, and the current rise of rightwing politicians, openly misogynistic, to the highest positions in many countries around the globe, I am afraid it was a false hope. But of course this is not a reason for giving up the activistic efforts. I have to be optimistic. Here I would like to mention how a youth jury in Holland that awarded my first film The Tree explained their decision - it surprised me a lot coming from such a young group of people; they said among other things that they think it is a kind of “film that can change the way we watch films”. They told me they watched several films each day and talked about them in the evening. But after a few days they realised that every evening they keep coming back to one film. The Tree gave them a lot to talk about, to question about, to doubt things they took for granted.

Camera Lucida: Would a cinema where identification with the main protagonist(s) is not necessary/mandatory be possible at all?
Sonja Prosenc: Maybe it is just a question to what extent it can enter mainstream. Actually I think there is a rise of this kind of films and at least the ones that are not too hard core in this manner and a bit easier to grasp, can become a part of something that is arthouse mainstream.

Camera Lucida: What does it mean to make an enjoyable film?
Sonja Prosenc: Some films are enjoyable while you watch them, and some films after you finish watching them, when you start to reflect on them, talk about them with your friends.

Maja Bogojević