Creative Constraints:
An Interview with Iva Radivojević​ (When the Phone Rang)
By Natalia Keogan

When the Phone Rang screens March 14 at Museum of the Moving Image’s First Look 2025 festival.

At 10:36 a.m. on a random Friday in 1992, the blissful naiveté of youth is resoundingly shattered in When the Phone Rang, the third feature from Belgrade-born, Lesbos-based filmmaker Iva Radivojević​. The 73-minute feature consists of eleven vignettes, each demarcated by the trill of the telephone. This number refers to the age of eleven-year-old Lana (keen newcomer Natalija Ilinčić), an avatar for adolescent Radivojević. In turn, narrator Slavica Bajčeta recalls ephemeral memories with a curt matter-of-factness that gradually gives way to a pained whisper. The first phone call, which curtly delivers news of a relative’s death, abruptly yanks Lana into a world of peril and precarity. With each subsequent transmission, Lana grows acutely aware of the growing destabilization all around her as relatives pass and friends flee amidst the violent fall of the former Yugoslavia.

Despite its anxious and melancholic air, When the Phone Rang also captures the golden haze of youth (aided by Martin DiCicco’s lush 16mm cinematography), with its moments of whimsy and wonder. Whether she’s peeping on a neighbor, in a Rear Window-esque sequence set to an era-appropriate Serbian synth-pop hit, or viewing a televised rendition of Georges Bizet’s Carmen, the flame of discovery is alive even as her family’s livelihood is jeopardized. Similarly, not even a raging war can compare, at times, to the monumental mortification of pubescence. A terrible haircut coupled with the arrival of Lana’s menarche perfectly translates a particularly relatable experience of young womanhood.

I met Radivojević at a Brooklyn cafe the week before her film’s March 14 screening. We discussed the film’s literary origins; her decision to compose the score; and the creativity that emerged out of intense budgetary, time, and aesthetic constraints.

Reverse Shot: How did this project begin for you?

Iva Radivojević​: It was a little bit unexpected. It wasn’t something that was brewing in my head. I took a poetry workshop at Naropa [University] with one of my favorite poets, Lewis Warsh, who’s since died. He gave us different prompts or constraints, which I love because it helps me write. He gave us this one particular constraint that had to do with this repeating sentence. Something about that really clicked. In one sitting, I wrote the first four stories. It was flowing naturally, and he was really excited about it. He told me I should turn it into a book. It sat there for a few years because I was working on my previous film, and I didn’t really revisit it. Then a few years later, when I had time, I began writing again and slowly started developing it into a film. I’m based in Greece, so something about going back to the Balkans, where I’m originally from, triggered feelings about dislocation and having left. I think a lot of things came up that wanted to come out.

RS: Did you originally intend to make this a book, or did you always feel that film was a more suitable medium?

IR: At that point, I hadn’t really published anything. Since then, I’ve published two, one art book and one chapbook. I mean, it was flattering because Lewis is one of my favorite writers. But of course, my medium is film. A small publisher in the UK will publish the story this summer, so I’m happy about that. I think the memories themselves, and the way the film is structured, are these ghosts that keep returning. The images were really present in my head, and I wanted to take them out and make them live.

RS: The first line in the film is, “It happened in a country that no longer exists, except in books, films and memories.” What specific touchstones did you look to while crafting this?

IR: It’s interesting, because for my previous films, there were so many influences. But for this film…I can’t think of any. I think the reason for this is that all of it was internal. When I’m making a film that’s not so personal and more external, I really go for influences. I was just going off of the feeling of these locations, the feeling of these memories looping and returning. The only reference I can point to is this piece of writing that Lewis Warsh gave us. For the life of me, I can’t find it, but it began with the same sentence. For years I’ve been trying to find out what that was. He died, so I can’t ask him. But that’s sort of what started everything.

RS: I’d like to know more about how you and your cinematographer, Martin DiCicco, navigated shooting on 16mm.

IR: We had a very, very small budget, so we had to be very economical. I had to storyboard each shot; not drawing them, but photoshopping and using images. I knew, for example, that we needed to shoot tightly to be in the subjective world of the girl. Also because we are claiming the ’90s, we didn’t have the budget [to recreate the era in wide shots]. We shot the whole film in eight days, believe it or not. We had two takes for each shot. It was so lucky that the main actress, Natalija [Ilinčić], was fantastic. There was a little bit of luck and magic involved. But Martin is a fantastic cinematographer. We worked together before, so we have a shorthand language. I trust him with everything. This is also my first time working with 16mm, and I will continue that because it’s beautiful. For this film, it made sense because the texture of 16mm isn’t crisp. It’s not shooting on 4K or 8K. It’s blurry, it’s not clear.

RS: Just like the memories you’re trying to evoke. I read that you, and maybe some of the crew, were living in the same building that you were shooting in. How did you find that location, and what was it like living and working in the same space?

IR: Talking about constraints, sometimes the ones concerning money are also helpful, in a way. I also get a little crazy, because I know what I can do with limited resources. Not everybody works like that. It took a lot of convincing my Serbian producers that things can be done this way. We’re used to this in Europe, where everybody hustles. But I found this apartment on Airbnb. It looked like one of those old apartments from that time. It had two rooms that I could transform to be different locations. I told this to the producers, and they went with it. We rented this place for a month. For each shoot, because we didn’t have a production designer, it was me, and sometimes Martin or others, moving furniture around, and so on. I would paste textures on the walls. It was fun because I like designing things, but when you’re the director and the production designer, it gets a little tricky. I slept in that apartment because of the budget. Martin stayed there for a few days, but then moved into a hotel. It was basically just me there, waking up, restructuring, shooting, and going to bed. It was an interesting experience. That kind of creativity charges me, as well. What can I come up with for nothing? It took so long to fund my last film, about five years, so I was not going to wait.

RS: I want to know more about recreating 1992—specifically your use of archival material, which mostly mines from your family’s personal artifacts.

IR: Yeah, the archive we use is all my family’s. Those are just family photos. In all my films, because of the budgetary constraints, I tend to use my own clothing and repurpose things. It’s almost what feels good, what feels right. I always knew I would use the family archive, because I wanted to resurrect these people who are no longer with us and give them a place to exist. Also, some of the actors in the film are my old neighbors. Like the older lady with the red hair, and the younger woman with the blond hair is her daughter. There was a lot of love involved in that as well. Somehow, the whole community came out to support.

RS: Even being abroad for so many years, you kept that connection with old friends and neighbors?

IR: There are instances of that in New York or specific communities, but there’s something about the Balkans where communities and neighborhoods are tightly knit. When you come back after years, there’s almost no loss of time. That felt like a huge, healing hug. People came down when we were shooting and would say, “I remember you when you were this big!” It was a beautiful process.

RS: I was really taken with the music in the film, both the popular songs of the time and the score you composed.

IR: Music is huge in my life. The first thing I do in the morning is walk around and listen to music. I go to shows all the time, so it informs a lot of my daily experience. But these are songs that we listened to at the time, songs that are still very alive and present in the society in Serbia, for example. We used to have a vinyl with the song by Zana, which is in the scene where they’re looking through binoculars. I knew I wanted to include songs that were important to me at the time. When I was a child, we had three channels on TV. One of the things that we used to watch was this opera program, and one time they played Carmen. I wanted to reuse that.

I wanted to work with a composer, but we didn’t have the funding. I used to play piano as a child—I’m not in any way a composer—but I figured it was interesting, because it would echo [Lana’s] childish playing. I literally smoked a joint one day, sat at my keyboard and just messed around. That’s what became the soundtrack. I did that even before I started editing, so I could kind of find the mood and the vibe of the piano that would drive the whole film. It had to be melancholic, but also childish and playful.

RS: Let’s talk about the edit. I imagine with an eight day shoot and two takes per shot of 16mm footage forced you to precisely know what you had.

IR: With this film, I edited in the script. I had to, because we didn’t have money. Every shot had to be very precise. Because I’m an editor—I edit my own films, I edit for other people—my mind just works in that way. The editing, of course, informs the rhythm. So, the edit didn’t really change from the script at all, except I did switch a few stories around so they could have a different emotional wavelength.

RS: The voiceover almost responds emotionally to what’s happening on screen. She whispers at some points and is completely monotonous at others. What direction did you give narrator Slavica Bajčeta?

IR: She’s this ghostly presence that guides the film. She’s also my childhood best friend. She lived two floors above us, and she knows the story very well. She became an actress, so she’s really good as a narrator. Obviously, at the end of the film she says “I,” revealing that it’s a personal story. It’s like therapy, where she’s talking to her younger self and is there to comfort her. She’s there to be with her but also tell the larger story. She’s haunting the images at the same time. We did three different takes: one that’s informative, one that’s a whisper and another one that’s neutral. I played around with those. Toward the end, when she’s reading out all the people that have disappeared, my friend reads her own name and her voice cracks. It’s almost like she’s going to cry. It’s beautiful because it works on so many different levels, emotionally, for us as friends.

RS: In terms of the broader casting process, were there any physical or emotional characteristics you were looking for in these actors playing people from your past?

IR: Actually, that’s why it was easy. I was looking for very specific characteristics: personality traits, how they carry themselves. For example, Natalija Ilinčić plays me as a child. She was very quiet in rehearsals, but she would get onstage and just flower with confidence. I was so moved by her that I was like, “This is the girl.” The only one that I would have maybe liked to have been a little different is the secretary.

RS: Was that not you playing her?

IR: No, no!

RS: Oh, I swore that was your cameo in the film!

IR: I had a tiny, tiny cameo, you can’t even see it. The secretary is this woman with dark hair, but in real life she had short hair and kind of a mustache. I just couldn’t find that!

RS: Not a lot of mustachioed women around?

IR: At least not anymore!

RS: As I was watching, I noticed that we never see your parents. We see your grandmother, sister, friends and neighbors. Why not cast people to play your parents?

IR: Initially, we were going to have actors for everyone. Again, we had to think about how we could cut the budget. I thought there was something interesting about being in this child’s world and all the adults being mostly outside of the frame. It becomes this Tom and Jerry kind of situation, where you see the cat and the mouse, but their owner is just these legs and hands. The idea was to be secluded in a child’s perspective. A child knows there’s a war going on, that there’s something malicious out there, but it’s an abstract idea. What they know for sure is what their present life looks like, what their relationships are like, what a loving connection is like. The adult world is very much outside of that.

RS: I have to ask if this time—10:36 am on a Friday—is actually from your memory or if there’s merely something poetic about that for you?

IR: It was early in the morning when this phone call came. My mom told me afterwards that it was actually a Wednesday, not a Friday. Again, all my memories are tied to this film, but I’m not exactly sure what happened before or after this moment. But everything revolves around this phone call because it’s the most vivid thing I can remember. It had to be a repeated thing. Whenever we experience something traumatic, the memories loop. I wanted to recreate this ghostly memory coming back to haunt you all the time. I wanted to also recreate how memory cannot be trusted. We remember very subjectively.

RS: This film isn’t only in conversation with this time and place you’re evoking, but with things that are occurring right now.

IR: Yeah. Since then, it’s been Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan. But this has been ongoing forever. I live on Lesbos Island, which is a huge point of entry for migrants. This is a presence in my life every day. All my films are about this location, but I’m also interested in the very specific way that a dislocated person experiences the world. I’m doing a PhD right now that is precisely about that and how it’s translated into cinematic language. There’s something about the translation of time that is different. That’s why these films are fragmented and structured differently; you don’t know where you are and it’s confusing.

RS: Will your filmmaking practice take a back seat while you pursue the degree, or is it integral to that process?

IR: It’s a practice-based PhD. It’s also in Europe, so we don’t have two years of coursework or whatever. I am working on a new film. I’m in the research process. It’s going to be on Lesbos Island [shot] on 16mm again. It spans 20,000 years. The main protagonist is an owl. It’s going to be interesting.