In 2011 Matthew Somerville was on a long and bumpy bus to Exit Festival. When he got home he looked at a map, retracing his movements he found Sava. Seeing this river, how it was once the longest river in Yugoslavia and today flows along borders, forming part of a frontier for the European Union, he called Dan McCrum. 
3 months later they drove in a 1999 Toyota Yaris from London to Belgrade to spend 6 weeks on the Sava, little did they know they would repeat the journey many times over the coming years, resulting in a love letter to the Balkans, to Sava and in the end to Mira Furlan.
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Through the film we meet an old steelworker, an international swimmer, the last ferryman on Sava, drag queens, artists, unemployed, war veterans, young families and anarchists who all find their own way to share stories related to identity, nature, nationalism and Sava to create discourse among them who disconnected by nation, religion and economic opportunity; have much in common through their shared heritage and the water which connects them. 
2018 we met Mira Furlan, we wanted a woman to play the voice of the river to represent mother nature and given Mira’s personal story with the region she was a perfect fit. We worked together on the words did a number of recordings together in London and LA, we had one final session booked in which we were not graced to record. Mira’s passing (January 2021) is a sad loss to the film and we are only grateful she watched a rough cut in full and loved what we were doing. It is an honour to be a part of her final message out to the world and there are so many layers of her personal story and Sava entwined.
  
The recurring themes of the film are around the natural world, identity and the changing post Yugoslav landscape focusing on a shared heritage and commonalities between people living on the banks of Sava.
Why Sava? The river has two major facets, or tributaries. On a micro level the film challenges over exposed narratives of the Yugoslav conflict by exploring contemporary stories of Sava’s inhabitants who irrespective of their nationality share a common thread through a shared heritage, relatable socio economic issues and a relationship to the water passing them every day. Empires, nations and flags change, nature carries on, flowing endlessly without judgement. As we live with a rise in nationalism and a changing climate it is important to give nature a voice in the discourse.
In 2019 editor Gorjan Atanasov was introduced to us and after moving to London to study a masters. For the next year and a half we worked tirelessly together to craft our first feature film. The film was made between 2013 - 2021 as a passion project with a small amount of funding being raised at the end for post production funding. After playing at festivals the aim is to make a travelling cinema downstream in summer 2022 to take the film back to the rivers inhabitants.
A defining motivation of SAVA is its afterlife, not only as a documentary film but a continuing project, firstly for the film to be taken along the river course, showing in cafes, museums, village halls and city cinemas and giving Sava communities an opportunity to see and think about their river as a whole, not just their own section. Alongside these screenings we will show river artefacts, folk tales, artworks and a 360 degree video installation.
If you want to know more about the making of the film please email: matthew@savafilms.com