Stuttering Fluidity – How my father became a sea creature

a film by Stefan Pavlović

Documentary | 100’
The Netherlands, France
Expected release: 2027
Production: artTrace, Serendipity Films
In development.

Synopsis

Haunted by a recurring dream of drowning, the filmmaker begins to see his father as a sea creature, and himself as a swimmer. Guided by the sense that stuttering may carry an underwater memory, as if inherited from whales, he travels from the Mississippi River to the Roer in the Netherlands and the Drina in Bosnia and Herzegovina, moving from English to Dutch to Bosnian. Each river carries its own memories and ways of flooding, echoing parts of the filmmaker’s history, language, and voice.

Along the way, he meets stuttering voices shaped by different histories: E., an African American sculptor on the Mississippi, with whom he shares an inability to float; Y., a Dutch-Moroccan boy obsessed with the Titanic; and T., a boat repairer at the source of the Drina whose speech was altered by war. Each meeting alters the film’s direction. Near the end of the river, he encounters a wounded pregnant horse who, in voice-over, dreams of becoming a whale, joining the film’s pull toward the water.

Through encounters with the film’s characters, personal video archives, and archival footage of water in different states, the film traces how stuttering slows, suspends, and reshapes time, storytelling, and conversation. Each stutter shifts time: slowing it down, speeding it up, altering what can be said and remembered. Searching underwater for fragments of his own voice, the filmmaker weaves these voices, waters, and histories into a conversation on language, memory, masculinity, friendship, and belonging.