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Bojana Novaković: I Imagined I was Making a Warm Portrait, but I got an all-out Turkish Soap Opera
Deciding to make a film about her aunt Gordana, the funniest person she knows, director Bojana Novaković had no idea that she would open a story about sexual violence, addiction, and family traumas. A film FORBIDEN AUNT will be screend at Competition Programme – Documentary Film.
Gordana, the aunt of director Bojana Novaković, is a colourful and loud hairdresser from Užice, who completely captivates the camera with her presence. Whether happy or sad, she seeks and takes attention. Her countless relationships, daily falling in love, her inability to be without a man, and her attitude of doing everything until she "drops dead" doing exactly what she wants to have a striking effect on the screen.
But the aunt hides a dark secret that marked her upbringing and which, hushed up and covered up, has been passed on to the next generation. Suffering, ashamed women, drowning in the mire of the province, carry their burden between reading the fate from the coffee grounds and bean fortune-telling remain in a small environment even when they can get out of it. In the end, they only have each other for support and comfort - if they realize it in time.
Did you have any idea what kind of adventure you were getting into when you decided to make a film about aunt Gordana?
I expected a much smaller adventure than making a feature film. I set out to make a short film about my Aunt Gordana, partly because I wanted to spend time with her and partly because I wanted to see if I could direct and edit.
At the time, all I knew was that she had overcome alcoholism, was caring for elderly people, and remained the liveliest, funniest person in our family. I imagined I was making a warm, redemptive Hollywood portrait of an eccentric woman who had survived a difficult life through being of service. Instead, I got an all-out Turkish soap opera with love, regret, crime and trauma!
I travelled to rural Serbia after a breakup expecting that my aunt might somehow cheer me up. I did not know the extent of the violence and abuse she had endured, and when I started filming, I uncovered a history that extended far beyond Gordana herself. I found three generations of women whose lives had been shaped by sexual violence, addiction and family trauma, and who had survived against extraordinary odds.
The journey forced me to see Gordana, my family and myself with much greater clarity… every one of us imperfect, addicted and intensely emotional. I was part of a family riddled with alcoholism, co-dependency and mental illness.
As someone whose professional background has been in acting, how did you adapt to the role of director?
When I became an actor, I thought actors were the main protagonists of filmmaking. It took me a few jobs to realize that actors are not the decision makers, are often a tool for an auteur's vision, and I found that frustrating for many years that I could not control what part of my performance would ultimately end up on screen.
Making this film was an opportunity to tell a story exactly the way I wanted to tell it, without someone else deciding how I should interpret it. I don't think I had to adapt from acting to directing because they're completely different skills. Acting, among other things, requires you to shut off parts of your intelligence so they don't get in the way. Directing demands that you somehow discover parts you didn't even know existed in order to problem solve in the moment.
Directing stretched me intellectually, emotionally and creatively in a way acting never had. Rather than inhabiting someone else's vision, I was responsible for creating something from the ground up. I also love that I can be present while directing, whereas with acting, I have to stay in my little bubble.
The opening of your film is hilariously funny. But as the story unfolds and we learn more about your aunt and your family, the humour gradually becomes much darker. As you uncovered long-suppressed family secrets, did you ever consider stopping the filming?
I never considered stopping the film because I never considered that I was making the film you see today. I thought I was making a humorous short portrait about my aunt, partly to see if I could direct, and partly to learn to use Avid (which to this day I do not know how to use).
As the interviews unfolded, the camera, and my presence behind it, became witness to decades of silence. Somehow, this presence gave everyone permission to say the unsayable to me, and to each other. There's even footage of me telling my family, "Don't worry, this is unusable in the film, but you guys should talk this out."
Everything changed when I sat down with the rushes. I realised I wasn't just looking at extraordinary family conversations; I was looking at something I'd almost never seen represented on screen in Serbia. A very personal, non-politicized story of intergenerational sexual violence that is so often hidden, softened or left unspoken altogether. Here it was unfolding with startling honesty, but also with humour and contradictions that exist in real families.
I showed the material to producer, Milan Stojanović, expecting him to tell me I'd gone too far. He said “This is a feature film, it is important for us, and you have to make it." That was the moment I realised the film no longer belonged only to my family. It had become something much larger and my responsibility in making it was different.
The staged soap-opera-style scenes are witty, colorful, and entertaining. By contrast, the story of transgenerational trauma that unfolds before the camera is anything but – it feels more like a Turkish melodrama where “no one is happy.” Did you have this soap-opera motif in mind from the very beginning?
If I'd planned the reenactments from the beginning, I would have saved all of us years of suffering through unwatchable edits. The soap opera sequences were born out of complete creative chance and desperation. We had a rough cut, and the middle of the film had become almost unwatchable. It was wall-to-wall trauma, held together by still photographs, and even I didn't want to sit through it because it was earnest, and also boring. I think boring is the most insulting thing you can do to a story about trauma. We had somehow made a film about a funny woman full of life, but we had left the humour out of it.
The solution arrived by accident during a conversation with my friend Joel Edgerton. I was complaining that my aunt was obsessed with Turkish soap operas and had this outrageous sense of humour, but the film was stagnant… and somewhere between my sentences and his, the idea appeared. To this day, neither of us is sure whose brain it came from. He thought I had suggested it, and I thought he had suggested it but neither of us had actually come up with it… an idea materialized from the coffee table in front of us.
Gordana's irreverent humour is the key to telling her story. Reimagining the darkest parts of her past through the heightened language of melodrama allowed us to tell an almost unbearable story with honesty, humanity and humour, without diminishing its gravity.
Gordana always believed her life deserved the full soap-opera treatment. As it turns out, she was absolutely right.
How do the family members who appear in the film feel about the final result of your years-long work?
Not everyone in my family has seen the film yet. But those who have, have embraced it wholeheartedly. I don't think that is a measure of the film's artistic merit, which is for audiences and critics to decide. What it does tell me is that the film feels truthful to the people whose lives it portrays. They recognise themselves in it, and for me that's one of the most important responsibilities of making an intimate family documentary.
This is not a true-crime drama about exposing perpetrators. It is a film about the people who live with the aftermath of violence, and the complicated, sometimes absurd ways they survive. I myself am also deeply exposed in this film. There are parts of my own life that I have never spoken about publicly, particularly my romantic life, and I had to make myself vulnerable in the same way I was asking my family to be. Ultimately, the thing that matters most to me is that my family feels seen rather than exploited. If that trust has been preserved, then I feel I have done my job.
I also think there is a danger with films about trauma becoming overly reverent or solemn in a way that can unintentionally diminish the very people they are trying to honour. Gordana, and my family, are not just victims of what happened to them. They are funny, complicated, chaotic human beings. Anything less would have been dishonest.