Shifting from documentary to fiction, Austrian filmmaker Andrina Mračnikar turns again to her heritage as a Carinthian Slovene in her newest work, Mila/Marija. World-premiered at the Zurich Film Festival, the film follows Mila – who takes on the partisan name Marija – as she joins the Slovenian Partisan Army in its struggle against the Nazis in Austria, later on dealing with the complex social and political post-war landscape.

Cineuropa: What was your approach to the context behind Mila/Marija - the research and the like?
Andria Mračnikar: I would say the research started for me when I was very young. I've made three documentaries on the topic of the Slovene minority in Austria and about partisans. For my film Carinthians Speak German, I did a lot of interviews, and got oral histories from former partisans and people who survived the concentration camps. I also read a lot of literature that mostly exists only in Slovene – stories written by survivors and witnesses from a first-person perspective.

The work of Marjan Linasi was very interesting for me because he did a lot of research on things such as how the fighting was organised, group movements and when each battle occurred. At one point, I had accumulated so much research, and reducing it down felt so difficult. Deciding on the story I wanted, out of all of those I read, became one of the most important things for me. It became clear that I wanted to tell it from a female perspective. The thing that interested me a great deal were those decisions made in times of war. How can you make a decision that's right, or what are the consequences of a decision that seems right in the moment?

This choice seems to turn the film into a small-scale epic, in a way. Mila’s journey thus takes place over a longer scale of time, through great changes. Can you talk about this choice?
My family’s story is strongly connected to the anti-fascist fight of the partisans, and how wartime and political changes can influence personal questions about family and love. That’s how this long-term story came about. Another thing that was very clear and important for me was that I didn’t want to end the story with the end of the war. I also felt like I needed to start the story pretty early because I would say that most of the audience doesn’t know anything about the Slovenian minority. I felt like I had to start with 1938, when spoken Slovene was forbidden.

The use of language and dialect in the film is memorable: the Slovene dialect sounds very different from standard Slovene, and German is used as a tool of power. How did you approach the language aspect?
In the development process, some people who were working with me were surprised that the question of language was so important to me. They said that people who speak German would not know the difference – of course, they wouldn’t know if it’s wrong or not. However, everyone from the Slovenian minority and from the community would know. It was important to me that it would be really correct – that we wouldn't feel that these were actors who were just trying to speak in dialect. We even corrected the slightest mistakes through automated dialogue replacement. The film is not based on a real story; it’s based on hundreds of real stories, so it was important for me that everything in the movie could have happened.

Mila (played by Doroteja Nadrah) also code-switches linguistically in Slovene with different people. She’s really versatile in this way as well.
We had a long casting process just to find the family constellation. For Mila, one point in the casting process was just to try to see how she would be able to speak the dialect. For [Doroteja], in the beginning, it was very hard because the pronunciation is really different. However, she studied it for more than a year, and she took this so seriously that she would speak to the dialect coach on the phone. She stayed in the coach’s home for one week. Then, she and Marko Mandić, who plays the father, started calling each other on the phone and speaking only in dialect. They were completely invested in it.

You work in a diverse set of locations, spanning different time periods. Can you talk about finding these places and shooting in them?
We had to scout a lot because we needed certain aspects for the film. For example, the family house was not easy to find, because we needed a house that was old but that would still be approachable for the team. The surroundings couldn’t be too modern either. Finding this house was kind of a miracle because it’s surrounded by the woods. It didn’t have electricity, so we had to bring electricity there, and it’s super-hard to reach.

This building was also special because we needed to have it in three different states: before the war, immediately after the war, and then a bit later. We all loved being in that house. It’s in an area where partisan fights really took place, as was the case in many places we shot in. Often, older people would come to us and tell us about the history of the houses and of the landscapes, and explain what happened there.