Some months ago, a friend who was visiting New York from Minnesota called me asking for immediate recommendations to kill an afternoon’s worth of time. I instructed her to go to Metrograph and see whatever was on, something I often did to fill a few hours when I lived in the city. As if by fate, she scored the final ticket to a screening and Q&A of Bosnian-Dutch filmmaker Ena Sendijarević’s vibrant satire Sweet Dreams (2023). My friend called me back as soon as she was out, thrilled to report that, aside from the incredible movie, its director, like me, is Bosnian but grew up in the West—Sendijarević in the Netherlands, myself in The US—as part of the post-war diaspora. Bosnia’s entire population is less than four million, so it’s not particularly common to see a fellow country(wo)man anywhere in the realm of art or media, or at least in media not targeting mainstream Bosnian audiences. My friend’s excitement became my own, and I knew I needed to watch Sendijarević’s movies.

Upon my friend’s return from her trip, we screened Take Me Somewhere Nice (2019), a candy-colored coming of age road movie set in Bosnia. The plot follows a late-adolescent protagonist named Alma, as she finds herself back in her home country trying to find a way to get to her sick father in the hospital. Throughout the journey, the director deftly tackles the stakes between natives and émigrés navigating a war-torn country and the cultural tensions between Eastern and Western Europe with a subtle humor. It was also the first time I had seen my kind of random immigrant background reflected so fully in a work of film, and it wholly enraptured me.

Several months later, I managed to finally watch Sweet Dreams myself (the movie is tragically difficult to find in the States unless you happen to fly Delta, who have a slew of Dutch movies on offer as part of a global airline partnership). While not at all about the Balkan diaspora, Sendijarević’s sophomore film presents a razor-sharp take on the absurdity and depravity of Dutch colonialism in Indonesia through a skillful blend of stylistic levity and the simultaneous gravity of the subject matter, all with the panache of a period piece. Her short Import (2016) and debut feature Take Me Somewhere Nice set forth the director as a thrilling new voice in European cinema; Sweet Dreams solidifies Sendijarević’s place as a growing auteur.

Sendijarević is ever the nomad; she’s currently based in Paris, and has spent her formative years in Amsterdam, the Dutch suburbs, and over 20 different places before she’d even turned 17. This constant migration in her own life undoubtedly informs the tone of her works, if not more quotidian aspects of her life (Import, for example, portrays the generational divide between children being raised in a new country, where it’s easier to pick up the cultural nuances, and the parents who encounter greater strife). Over Zoom, Sendijarević sits down with Document to discuss the many origin stories that led her to becoming a director, from her nomadic lifestyle to her favorite moments in slow cinema.

Sabina Latifovic: What brought you to filmmaking?

Ena Sendijarević: That’s something that I ask myself often as well, because I’m not one of those directors who knew at five years old that she was going to be a director. It just happened to me, in a way, weirdly. I wasn’t exposed so much to cinema. I was creative as a kid, but I didn’t really think that I could make that into a job. My parents wanted me to become a doctor, and I just followed that path blindly until it was time to go to university. And then suddenly I realized, I have to figure out what I’m going to be, and then I started to study media in Amsterdam, and critical theory as well. During these studies I learned a lot, and I was exposed to a lot of really beautiful masterpieces of cinema. I started to fall in love with that. And, you know, we would just watch these films in the middle of the day, like three, four films a week. Towards the end, I kind of had to decide, okay, so what am I going to become now? I did an exchange year in Berlin, and I met a lot of creative people there. And by the time I left Berlin, I kind of decided maybe I can just become a director. One thing led to another. It wasn’t like I had a plan, I just always followed whatever felt good in a way, or whatever brought me some kind of depth, or some feeling of doing something that mattered, so I just followed the river and now I’m here. I don’t know where the river is gonna go. I don’t have, like, very clear endpoints to this, to my career.

Sabina: I know you have an upcoming movie, right, The Possessed? Is there anything you can tell me about that?

Ena: Not really. I’m sorry. I’m really right into the writing process here in Paris now, and I’m just afraid I would jinx it or spoil it, or, you know.

Sabina: I figured I’d ask. Is there a tentative release timeline?

Ena: Now we are at the end stage of writing, and we’re gonna start with the casting soon. I think we will shoot beginning 2026, so however long it’s going to take after that to do the post production. It’s kind of a big project. It’s gonna be my first English language film, so that’s exciting for me.

Sabina: For Take Me Somewhere Nice, did you write that in Bosnian? Or did you start that in English or Dutch?

Ena: No, I started in Dutch.

Sabina: I was going to be very impressed, because my Bosnian is not very good, I would not be able to write a script in Bosnian.

Ena: No, me neither. That was also some source of shame, of course. And, you know, this whole language thing became a very big part of the underlying feelings of the film, in a way, and me not having access to the language. I’m learning French now, and I was thinking about how easy it is to start learning a language, but how hard it is to go back to the language that is at your roots, and especially when you had to leave those roots in a violent way. There’s guilt and shame and all these feelings surrounding it.

“I think cinema is more about capturing a certain feeling instead of just telling a story.”

Sabina: As a fellow Bosnian who grew up in the post war diaspora, it was really exciting to watch Take Me Somewhere Nice, because it was the first time I’ve seen that specific experience depicted anywhere. How did making a movie there affect your relationship to your Bosnian identity?

Ena: That’s a hard question, and I’m not sure if I really know the answer. I think the film was about this complicated relationship between somebody in the diaspora [traveling to] their country of origin, about these complications and tensions. At the same time, I mean, there’s so much more to this relationship that I have to this country or this identity. It’s much bigger than just a film. I feel like that film has taken up so much space that sometimes I need to remind myself of that. Maybe in the future, I will make another film about that.

Sabina: So your two features and your short Import, to me, they all had a very strong tie of belonging—who gets to belong, where, how, why? In Sweet Dreams, I wrote down as I was watching it, the mom at one point says to Karel, ‘You don’t need to have been somewhere to be from there.’ And so I know you were born in Bosnia, you grew up in the Netherlands, now you’re in France. Do you feel a sense of belonging anywhere in particular?

Ena: Actually, I do. I think that place would be Europe for me, I do feel European. I mean, of course, Bosnia, you know, the Balkans, Eastern Europe. I live in Western Europe mostly, but I do feel like I have both of these sides inside of me. I think I have a connection to that history, even if I want it or not. I do feel like this has informed who I have become, and the more I learn about it, the more that’s also something that I try to do through my films.

Sabina: I think you mentioned this in your Metrograph series, but one of your influences was The Cremator by Juraj Herz. I watched it recently, and I thought it was one of the wildest movies I’ve ever seen. I wanted to ask, what are your other big influences, whether that’s film or literature or music or anything else?

Ena: I feel like for every project, I have new ones. For me with filmmakers, it’s like, I don’t like all the works of filmmakers that I love. It’s kind of project-based, the inspiration. For example, Juraj Herz was important for Sweet Dreams. But somebody like Tsai Ming Liang, he was very important when I was making Take Me Somewhere Nice, for example. Or just like filmmakers who have this very visual approach. Definitely a lot of filmmakers who were involved with New Wave filmmaking, whether it’s in France, or even in Yugoslavia. But also somebody like Ingmar Bergman, I remember when I saw Summer with Monika. That was one of those films that I saw for the first time on a Wednesday afternoon in the cinema. And that really touched me on a very deep level. I thought it asked certain life questions that I thought were important, and visually it was something that I’d never seen before. That’s a film that I always think of when I think about the early side of my career.

Sabina: I know you have two features so far, but to me, it feels like you already have a kind of distinctive voice and style. How have you honed that over time? Or how have you come to that?

Ena: I made three short films before I started making the features, and they were different from each other. I think the last one of them, Import, was kind of the start of this visual style that I explored further in Take Me Somewhere Nice and in Sweet Dreams. Mostly I’m very much inspired by the more visually-driven filmmakers from the past. I feel like you have filmmakers who really love to tell through the image, who see the image as a painting, and then you have filmmakers who are more plot-focused, and when they’re plot-focused, then it seems like they are not necessarily being judged by what they do visually, it’s all about the story. We all dive into the same pool of film history. When I write, I try to write as visually as possible, and then collaboration with the DP is very, very important. I think cinema is more about capturing a certain feeling instead of just telling a story. So that’s always very important to me when I work. I try to be mindful of how I’m using the other art forms as well, whether that’s theater or painting or music or whatever.

Sabina: I like to joke that my favorite movies are all slow, boring and in French. I made my friends watch a four hour movie by Jacques Rivette recently, and they were like, ‘We’re not doing this.’ They quit. And I was like, ‘But it’s so gorgeous, like every scene is so pretty!’

Ena: It’s also a cliché that when it’s ‘cinema’ that it always has to be slow. It’s not the case. Actually, it’s very hard to make a slow film. Because the thing is, a film can be slow, but it only works if it has a lot of tension, like, if the shot is so exciting that you can look at it for a long time. It’s not a matter of just making the shots stay long. It has to have strength. And I think it’s very few filmmakers who can do that. Making a new world, that’s what a film can be, right? And that’s also why some great filmmakers don’t make great films all the time. It’s a matter of the universe wanting it all to come together. There’s so many things that are not in your hands. That’s one of the hardest things as a director. You have to let the film go through you. When you feel it’s flowing, then it feels like you’re doing something. That’s good, right?