The Land of Šar

How did you discover the protagonists? Where exactly is the story taking place?

In 2017, my friend, Finnish producer Kristiina Pervilä, came to Makedox, a documentary film festival that I was organising in Skopje. She asked Brand Ferro, who was later the DoP on the film, to help her find working Šarplaninac dogs, also known as Sharr dogs, that she was fascinated with. This is only possible up on the Šar Mountains. Marjan, a breeder and later one of our protagonists, took her on horseback to Solunska Glava, the highest peak.

When she came back four days later, by the look on her face I immediately knew there was a story to be told. Actually, not so much a story but a possible way of life that exists so close to ours, and which we know so little about.

The Zekirov family are outcasts in their own community. They live an ascetic and traditional life, too much so even for the inhabitants of their home village, Gorno Jabolčište, closest to Solunska Glava. It’s a huge village, with a thousand kids in the school, and at least one member of each family works abroad. They mostly identify as Albanian, while the Zekirov kids aren’t even sure how to spell their name.

The boys really live in bachilos, makeshift huts on different altitudes of the mountain, with the sheep and the dogs, and go to the village maybe five times a year.

They are simple farmers from the earth – not oriented towards financial gain but living a full life and having good relationships with everyone. This is partly because this is all they have ever known and was passed on to them from generations of shepherds before them. Such pure and honest souls are rare.

How did you approach them when you started to make the film?

Initially we didn’t even know where exactly to find them, these mountain plains are huge and they could have been anywhere. We came to Gorno Jabolčište and inquired, we were lucky and soon found them. It all went smoothly, the father and the grandfather immediately agreed that we can film the kids – maybe because we brought our own kids along.

At first I came there with my Western, urban attitude, with questions such as, where are their parents, do these kids go to school, why are they working, look at their living conditions… But they were very open to us. After spending five summers with them, I learned so much about my misconceptions of being a mother: wanting the best for your children but also causing harm to their personal growth by not teaching them how to survive and fail, how to make mistakes.

Was it your conscious decision to not show their parents?

We filmed them all except for the mother, they asked us not to. She doesn’t feel comfortable on camera, and also has her hair covered. I opted against showing this aspect of them being Muslim, which is very visible in the village where also the father and grandfather move about, because the family is not very religious and it’s not the point of the film. It might mislead the audience into a social-political angle that’s really not the issue in their lives nor is it relevant for their lifestyle that I wanted to depict.

It was far more interesting to me what these shepherds think about and how they live in close connection to the nature and animals. I was also, as a woman, observing the nature of men in their childhood, adolescence and adult behaviour. It felt as if instead of three boys I was seeing one in different periods of his life, but they are all very different. I felt I was seeing them from a perspective of filmmaker but also of a mother, and understood it was OK if their mother was not present.

This is a very remote area, how did the filming go? How long did you stay with them?

There are no roads there, no mobile network, driving up there even in an off-road vehicle is difficult as after the snow melts, it leaves the barely existing paths very rough, over many huge rocks. Sometimes it takes eight hours to cross 20 km on this terrain, especially if it rains – once we got stuck even in a military vehicle designed especially for such purposes. When it snows, you simply have to wait it out and sometimes that can take a week.

We visited them many times over five summers, sometimes staying for a week or two, and in the last two years with a crew of eight people, which is rather large for a documentary production. This was necessary because of this difficult access and the need to adjust to the weather.

How did you approach the visual aspect in such a magnificent location?

I am very happy with the work of Brand Ferro and both second camera operators, Gjorgji Klincharov and Branko Avramovski. They were shooting on rough terrain, among nettles and aggressive dogs. The temperature there sometimes changes 40 degrees from night to day. There was a lot of action so it wasn’t easy, especially for boom operator Jules Valeur who had to turn his work into a kind of an amazing ballet.

Shepherds’ daily activities are repetitive: they wake up, feed the dogs, take the sheep out and return for dinner. But the boys are so fast and used to the terrain, it was hard to catch intimate moments. It wasn’t easy to plan and it took a lot of time and observational skills. This film was like an improvised choreography, with two cameras avoiding each other and the sound operator, in an impossible-to-control set of four kids, 30 dogs and 600 sheep.

How did you approach the sound design, with all the natural sounds that your microphones must have caught?

My main goal was not to tell a big story of the last shepherds in Macedonian mountains, but rather to feel how it is to live this life, from all angles, how does it convey to be a working dog, a child or a teenager growing up there. In order to touch this disappearing world, you have to become a part of it, and that is what I was interested in.

To hear a thunderstorm on a mountain where there is nowhere to hide can only be described by sound. I work with Vladimir Rakić as sound designer on most of my films, and it was a long and intensive process in editing with Laureline Delom and Sashko Potter Micevski.

How would you describe this editing process?

I would say it was a kind of filigree editing. After a long time in the process with Laureline and producer Victor Ede, we realised that the plot should be simpler and focus on the human-dog relationship and relationships among siblings. They are pure and no extra drama is needed, they are all really special just as they are and it was a privilege to observe them and be with them.

How about the music?

In the last stage I invited Slovenian musician Iztok Koren to join the team. We had a long discussion whether we needed a score or not, but he did a great job. He played all the instruments and I got to sing in my film, together with foley artist Vera Galešev. We tried to portray the woman’s touch they are longing for. In this remote place, staying for 3–4 months alone on the mountain brings up all kind of aspects of male frustration, but also on the level of the younger boys who are missing their mother.

Tell us something about this unique dog breed and how it ties in with this way of life.

For the brothers, the dogs are at the same time a business, a tool, but also companions. Karabash Sharr dogs are the oldest breed that are in the family for many generations. Belička, Zarif’s favourite, is the most perfect dog by cynology standards – there are not many working Karabash dogs left. They have a distinctive black mouth and are the most reliable in terms of guarding and fighting wolves, they are obedient and caring.

Belička is a family treasure, and when Marjan took her to Skopje it started a big argument between the brothers. Dogs stick to their masters and it was clear that Zarif’s connection with Belička was strong, so when she was taken away, he lost interest in this business. Their real purpose is to stay on the mountain because this is the only way to have dogs freely guarding their sheep. Mountains are their home and they can’t function among large groups of people, so there is no way to have these dogs in the village. So the brothers stay in one bachilo during the summer and another one for the winter. The main reason they continue to have a strong dog pack is because no wolves can touch their sheep. It happened that a wolf killed 30 sheep, not for food but just to get revenge on the dogs.

How do you see the fact that this way of life is slowly disappearing?

Will they keep this precious knowledge and lifestyle? I can only pray to all the mountain gods to keep them there but I simply don’t know. I know it is like a domino effect: if one leaves, others can’t handle it without him. For Zarif and Zekir it is important to find their balance, they were brought up not to be rebellious. Zekir and Zarif now work for younger brothers, and when they are too old for this, the younger brothers will work instead of them. But if they don’t have kids before they are 30, the gap will be too big to continue this way.

As Zekir says, the mountain won’t move, and I can only hope that they will stay, the tradition will continue and I’m waiting to be invited to a wedding.