The title isn’t an order; it’s a plea. Wind, Talk to Me, Stefan Djordjevic’s feature debut, began as a portrait of the director’s ailing mother, Negrica, and was set to follow her as she battled cancer in the family’s little lakeside house in the Serbian countryside. When she finally passed, the film became something else entirely: a portrait in absentia. Weaving glimpses of the woman’s last days with shots of relatives trying to process her departure, Wind dances between past and present to resurrect Negrica through the memories she left behind. Djordjevic interviews his family as thoroughly as he inspects (and eventually renovates) his mother’s final retreat, which is another way of saying that Wind is interested in the woman’s relationship with people and spaces, animate and inanimate forces alike. Even (perhaps especially) as death drew nearer, Negrica believed that the border between herself and the world was permeable enough that she could commune with the elements, speak to the wind. “Close your eyes and believe,” Negrica tells Djordjevic at film’s end, and the words must have stuck––they’re the same he repeats at the start: “the wind makes wishes come true.”
“Elemental” is a cliché that’s all too hastily trotted out to describe films attuned to their natural settings, but here’s one towards which the term feels especially fitting. For a work that’s committed to rescuing traces of Negrica form every corner, the powers of nature hold the same significance as any other flesh-and-blood character: they’re repositories of memories and secrets. If Negrica could speak to the wind, then the breeze billowing around the house must have heard her. What did the woman say? What does the wind remember?
This is not the first time Djordjevic mined his own family history. His 2019 short The Last Image of Father followed a terminally ill dad as he roamed Belgrade to find someone who’d look after his only son––a work Djordjevic has said was borne out of a need to process his relationship with his own estranged father. Yet Wind ups the ante, its boundary between fiction and memoir much more porous. As Negrica dies, so does the original plan to make “a film about mum.” Undeterred, Djordjevic doesn’t abandon the project but simply extends its scope, casting other relatives in what becomes a joint effort to grapple with her death. It bears noting that the director had already teamed with his brother, Boško, one of a few folks playing themselves in Wind, for a photography show Diary of Mum, comprising pictures of Negrica the two siblings exhibited in Belgrade in 2020. Wind, at any rate, reveals glimpses of its original design, interspersed as it is with scenes Djordjevic shot before his mother’s passing. Some capture intimate conversations between them, the camera adoringly fixed on Negrica in close-ups while Djordjevic speaks to her from offscreen; others find the woman posing for her son in and around her country home. But for the most part, Wind is concerned about what happened after she left: this is a story about the vertigo of loss, emotional and creative.
Written by Djordjevic, Wind unfolds as a series of loose vignettes spanning a few summer days, roughly the amount of time it takes Stefan and Boško to renovate their mother’s retreat. That’s about as far as plot goes––save, perhaps, a parallel storyline involving a dog Stefan runs over and winds up adopting, a metaphor for healing that might well count as the only on-the-nose moment in a film that otherwise deftly blurs the boundary between what’s staged and what isn’t, leaving one with the feeling that everything was essentially snatched on the fly.
That, in retrospect, might be Djordjevic’s greatest feat. There’s a telling passage early on that sees Negrica––filmed inside a cave, a torch barely etching her silhouette in the dark––rebel against her son’s instructions as to where and how she should pose: “let me be myself!” No one else in Wind protests quite so vehemently, but the whole film rests on a productive tension between unscripted moments and others that, if not wholly planned, feel relatively more structured. Yet Wind never plays manipulative, so much so that it’s almost baffling to discover Djordjevic didn’t handle the camera himself. Lensed by Marko Brdar, the film traffics in static shots that frame people from a respectful distance, as though wary of disrupting their confessions. There are no close-ups––except for those of Negrica right at the end––nothing that could falsify exchanges or dilute their power.
Such an unobtrusive approach helps Djordjevic avoid cheap sentimentalism. It’s not that Wind isn’t sad; it’s that the sadness and ensuing catharsis feel entirely earned, and not the result of structural circumstances. By picking up a camera and training it on his family, moving between fly-on-the-wall sequences and more carefully designed moments, Djordjevic doesn’t just identify documentary as artifice. He also reveals how cinema can enlarge something as personal as a mother-son bond to much bigger proportions, inviting perfect strangers into their orbit in a way that never feels voyeuristic. Negrica’s ultimate legacy amounted to a different way of being in the world. She wanted Stefan to learn how to listen to the wind––to place his faith in things that cannot be explained. Wind, Talk to Me is itself an act of faith: a son learning to surrender to the world and finding his mother flowing through it still.
Wind, Talk to Me premiered at the 2025 International Film Festival Rotterdam