SPOT

A Short Talk with Stjepan Hren (editor)

BEST STUDENT FICTION Category

22nd IN THE PALACE International Short Film Festival 2025

Croatia, Fiction, Croatian, 00:21:36, 2024

Synopsis: Fleka doesn’t leave the vicinity of his building. He spends time with his neighbors and occasionally skateboards. Since his mom ended up in a psychiatric clinic, his best friend is his only family. Sometimes, he passes the time with a neighbor who has mental health issues and has adopted a pig. Soon, he realizes that this neighbor is his only friend.

Biography: Sara Alavanić (Croatia, 1998) studies Film and TV Directing (MA) at Zagreb’s Academy of Dramatic Arts. She previously earned a degree in Graphic Design from the Faculty of Graphic Arts.  She is a member of Blank_Film Incubator, where she directed her first films People Stink, But They’re Warm (Pula Film Festival 2020) and Do You Feel Nervous When I Approach You? (ZagrebDox 2020). Her most recent film Spot, premiered at Zagreb Film Festival (2024) and won the Golden Pram.

Sara Alavanić, director

Evgenia Evtimova: The film features some dreamy visuals, almost like it was shot on film. Was this the original look of the footage, or did you create it in post? What was the intention behind it?

Stjepan Hren: The footage was already beautifully shot and perfectly recorded. But since there was a lot of improvisation during the shoot, the acting ended up defining the film’s story. In the early stages of editing, we realized we had to throw out the script, it just didn’t work anymore. The first rough cut was nearly 40 minutes long, so we had to cut a lot. The biggest challenge was finding the right narrative structure, and shaping the version of the film that felt right to us. It took us about half a year to get there, which is a long time for a short film.

Evgenia Evtimova: From what you're saying, it sounds like you ended up with something closer to documentary material, everything improvised and reconstructed in the edit.

Stjepan Hren: Exactly. The B-roll you see, those looser, more observational moments, that’s actually documentary footage. The rest of the film isn’t strictly documentary, but it’s definitely unconventional for fiction. A lot of what made it into the final cut were moments filmed before the actors “officially” started acting. So yes, in that sense, it carries a documentary feeling. Still, I wouldn’t call it a hybrid.

Evgenia Evtimova: One moment that stood out to me was the sound match between the pig eating and the kissing scene, how did that transition come about?

Stjepan Hren: Ah yes, the pig. That was actually one of the trickiest elements. We kept asking ourselves: what does it even mean? But we knew it had to be present throughout the entire film. That specific cut, the transition between the pig and the kiss, came mostly from intuition. We tried a lot of different things, and that just clicked. Many of the film’s transitions were built the same way, experimenting and feeling our way through.

Evgenia Evtimova: There are some very intimate scenes in the film. Often people ask the director how those were handled on set, but we forget that someone also has to watch, and edit, that footage. As the editor, how did you approach these moments?

Stjepan Hren: Actually, the director is my girlfriend, so I was involved from the very beginning, even in pre-production. I was also on set and got to know the actors well. I saw how those scenes were rehearsed and filmed, so by the time I got to editing, it all felt very natural to me. And honestly, it wasn’t the first time I had to edit something like this.

Interviewer: Evgenia Evtimova

Editor: Martin Kudlac