Producer, Videographer & Editor 2008

Tallava SuperStar

Media Production Documentary Film Editing

The challenge

Tallava is a form of music adopted into Balkan folk, and most conversations about it stop at whether it is any good. The film takes a harder position: that the music is a reflection of the political and social events of the preceding fifteen years, and that how a region treats it says something about the region. An argument like that cannot be announced. It has to be built out of what the contributors say, in the order you put them in.

What I did

I produced it, shot it, and cut it. That meant lining up the musicians, performers, and thinkers who appear in it, being the one holding the camera in the room with them, and then deciding in the edit what the film was actually claiming and finding that claim inside the footage: which voices carry which part of the argument, where a contradiction is more useful than agreement, and how much of the personal thread to let through before it becomes the subject instead of the lens.

Results

  • A finished 45-minute documentary, screened at DokuFest in 2008
  • One of the two titles IMDb lists me as known for, alongside PUNPUN
  • Three jobs on one film: producing, shooting, and editing

Tallava SuperStar is a 45-minute documentary made in Kosovo in 2008. I produced it, shot it, and edited it. It screened at DokuFest.

The subject is tallava, a form of music absorbed into Balkan folk that people in the region hold strong opinions about and rarely examine. The film treats it as evidence rather than as a taste question. If a kind of music spreads that fast, through that particular fifteen years, the spread is telling you something about the politics and the society underneath it.

That framing is the whole editorial problem. The film is built from people talking: musicians, performers, and thinkers, plus a personal thread about a generation that grew up with this music playing in the background. None of them states the argument. The argument only exists in the order.

So editing was the writing. Which voice opens, which one you hold back until it lands harder, where you let two contributors disagree because the disagreement is the point, and how long the personal story runs before it stops being a way of seeing the subject and becomes the subject. You find out what the film is by cutting it, and then you cut it again now that you know.

It is the oldest credit on this page and the one furthest from everything else here. It is also where a lot of the rest started. Carrying a project end to end, holding an audience's attention, cutting what does not earn its place, and building an argument someone can follow are the same skills I later needed for PUNPUN, for the short formats at Ripost, and honestly for a landing page.

See Tallava SuperStar on IMDb

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