13/09/2023 - The filmmaker homes in on the parent-child themes central to her new movie, Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No 5, and how genre influences her dramas

(© Heidi Scherm)

Berlin-based Slovenian filmmaker Hanna Slak has premiered her fourth feature, Not a Word [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Hanna Slak
film profile], at the Toronto International Film Festival. It comes on the heels of The Miner [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Hanna Slak
film profile], which was the Slovenian entry for the 2018 Foreign-language Academy Award. Cineuropa sat down with the filmmaker to talk about the parent-child issues that are at the core of her new movie, the influence of Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No 5, and how genre seeps into her dramas.

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Cineuropa: Your inspiration came from an unsettling moment in your neighbourhood in Berlin. How did this personal observation shape the underlying themes about violence and its consequences?
Hanna Slak: I'm very sensitive to how we deal with the consequences of violence. An incident that affected me had to do with how the violent death of a child was dealt with in my Berlin neighbourhood. Apart from the abusive tabloid press, there were no visible attempts to talk about it. I witnessed schoolchildren reading news about it in the tabloids, which made me wonder: how do they process such information? Does it leave an impact, a scar? Can they articulate their distress, or does it result in silent trauma or neurotic behaviour, the causes of which can be misinterpreted by adults?

Why did you decide to focus on a parent-child rift?
The story focuses on a relationship crisis between a mother and son, exploring the different depths and nuances of this relationship. As with any such connection, parenting is not static; it's a dynamic process, a journey of changing individuals. You have to reinvent the relationship constantly or else a communication breakdown can happen. On top of this, what happens to the characters in the story is that they are both impacted by a violent event, which is something that is not immediately visible to them, but it makes the misunderstandings between them almost impossible to solve.

Mahler’s Symphony No 5 is a significant motif. How did it shape the film's overall structure and pace?
I was interested in transposing the musical storytelling of Symphony No 5 into a film story. Mahler experienced the tragic deaths of children in his life, which I believe fostered a unique emotional wisdom. In his Symphony No 5, I hear him confronting the trauma of loss and navigating the complexities of mourning, searching for a form of healing. This is only my personal interpretation of the symphony as a storyteller; I am not a musicologist. What I was interested in was this immanent story of confronting darkness during the search for a place where the healing process can start.

Your work with nature is also significant in the film.
That’s another thing that connects me to Mahler's music. In his music, I hear cycles, and repetitions of musical ideas and rhythms, which is also something that I observe in nature, like the movement of the tides, which we tried to capture in the film. And then there is this unpredictability and violence of nature which is not benevolent or malevolent. It's just a force. It's things like the sudden changes of light, of wind and of waves, which sometimes come as a complete surprise – it’s spectacular and fascinating. We wanted to allow nature to have a voice in our film.

Why did you cast Maren Eggert in the leading role?
I'm a big fan of her work in film and theatre. She carries a kind of mystery, an intriguing ambiguity. She can be monstrous, and she can be immensely funny. She's never only what is visible on the surface of the character. I wasn’t interested in constructing a protagonist who would give us answers about what they are going through, but rather someone who would make us question what they are going through. I think that's a quality that Maren very much brings to her roles in the cinema and the theatre.

You mentioned that you like to fuse genre and arthouse filmmaking.
I like to work on the edge of genre. I love working with suspense, using some of the tropes and cinematic language that is common to genre cinema. In the case of Not a Word, it is the elements of psychodrama or thriller that are involved. I can see that there are other filmmakers around the globe, in Asia and Europe especially, who are interested in making this fusion of genre and arthouse cinema. I feel like part of this movement.

What was the major influence on, or inspiration for, Not a Word in terms of genre filmmaking?
Maybe not a direct influence, but filtered through my subjective memories of his films, it would have to be Alfred Hitchcock. In his cinema, it feels at times like almost nothing is happening, and still, there is so much tension. Also, it’s the way he portrays nature in his films. The movement of the ocean, the skies, the colours of the crops in the fields… Those are images that appear in my mind when I think about Vertigo, North by Northwest or The Birds.