Today we’d like to introduce you to Sara Markovic.
Hi Sara, it’s an honor to have you on the platform. Thanks for taking the time to share your story with us – to start maybe you can share some of your backstory with our readers?
During my early Highschool days, our dad brought a new special object to the house: a projector. I remember seeing Hitchcock’s remastered Vertigo and experiencing euphoria. It was sheer beauty. Right after school, I enrolled into the Academy of Arts in Belgrade, back home in Serbia, in the Directing program. I started working on movie sets and commercials, first as 2nd AD and script supervisor, then as a 1st AD, along which I was directing my student films and low-budget hired-gigs until I started directing TV commercials with production value.
But something in me was itching for quite some time and I felt like I wanted to see how the filmmakers do it in America, the legs and wings of the film industry. After ten years of working in a very developed film industry in Serbia (yes, happy to talk more about it), I went to the US to pursue my Master’s degree. Alas, it was 2020, the first year of the pandemic and everything was in disarray. I got accepted to my favourite film program in NYC but due to their decision to go online, so serendipity took me to Boston, a city I have never been in before!
My studies were emotionally turbulent due to the lack of connections I was able to make under the circumstances of the pandemic. So, I decided to search for my luck elsewhere, and I moved to LA.
I found my first screenwriting internship, after which I realized I prefer production to writing. Then I pursued an internship in documentary development in Boston for amazing Arch and Bow films, who have their film Richland on Tribecca Festival right now. That was the best move, and it helped with my current project that is an autobiographical documentary series.
In the meantime, the connections I have been building on both coasts in the previous two years brought me an independent feature film to produce for my classmate from Emerson! Lauren Musgrove and her business partner, Maggie Brown, run their own business and are doing their third feature film in this year! I was so lucky to hop on the team for Purple Magnet Productions and Ugly Sweater film with them.
Along came another feature for me to produce, a spectacular real-life story about forced marriages in Zanzibar through documentary, reenactment, and VR techniques. This mixed media project is going to be a blast by Iranian filmmaker Asma Khoshmehr, whom I also met my grad program at Emerson.
In the meantime, I am producing, directing, writing, shooting and editing a passion project of mine: Survivor’s Guide to Diaspora. It is a personal guide on how to stay sane while creating a life from scratch in America and it is intended for the web. I am currently bi-costal and Transatlantic really, as I also travel to Serbia to direct commercials and other exciting projects that are cooking as we speak!
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
Just recapping the last three years, it has been an obstacle after obstacle. But I grew so much because of it! Moving to another continent where I don’t have a single family member, during the pandemic, to a State that is the most rule-led State (Massachusetts), I would say I am just starting to recover (laughs).
Film business is all about the personal relationships, so it takes time until you can prove you are a hardworking creative with integrity. I was so lucky that in Belgrade, I grew together with my producer – at first, we were just the two most disobedient kids in our Highschool class, but later on she enrolled to Producing and I into Directing program in undergrad, so we naturally helped each other on projects and she always had my back and helped make my films come true. Minja Jovanovic now runs a leading production in Belgrade, specializing in top-notch commercials and music videos from all over the world, She Films. When you have that kind of person, you have a team, and everyone else wants to join the ride. That is my and other internationals’ challenge in a foreign country – how fast can you find your team?
I am lucky in the US too, to be surrounded by young women who inspire me because of their boldness, hope, ambition and the ability to communicate without much ego involved. But it takes time to create those real connections!
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
I am a director-screenwriter and comedy is my thing. I love fiction and documentary equally because each one contains irreplaceable tools for storytelling. For me, it comes down to: what does the story want? I derive all my work from personal experience. Whatever puzzles me as a thinking human being trying to understand the mess around me, that is the inspiration for my projects. All the characters I write are based on real people I’ve met.
My current project is called Survivor’s Guide to Diaspora, an autobiographical docu-series told in the form of a non-conventional guide for future immigrants in the US. Through the endless POV of my mistakes, absurdities and struggles, I am telling a story of a young woman trying to find her place under the sun like anyone else. It is funny, sincere and deeply personal.
Being an independent artist, I love to direct commercials because they keep me in training and I get to do what I do, more often then if I would stubbornly wait for the funding for my films (which comes hard and rarely).
I’ve also been producing a lot lately. I think that is because my collaborators recognize I am very good with people – I create bonds easily, and I do a good job maintaining them. I see no issue to approach anyone, whether they are a much bigger fish than anyone I work with. That must have something to do with the fact that my part of the world (Eastern Europe) doesn’t have this much disparity between the social classes like the US. I grew up sitting at the same table with drivers, academics, drug dealers, and artists. We all share the similar passion for socializing, day philosophizing and hedonism. But of course, it must have something to do with my personality. I LOVE PEOPLE. And that’s why comedy is my choice: none of us have it together, and that is charming when you really think about it. I am and advocate for this kind of portrayal of characters in the film, for the true representation of all of us, but specifically in the stories with hopeful endings!
Are there any books, apps, podcasts or blogs that help you do your best?
Apps: Shazam, the best invention in the world, DownDog – yoga at home yeeey! Podcasts: I’m not a regular at those – I always prefer listening to music to receiving more information, it does me better for my mental health.
Books: I’ve been reading Women Who Run With The Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estés, and I keep returning to it. I think it should be obligatory literature for all the girls in the world. It helps me navigate my femininity in all aspects of my existence. And it doesn’t fire up the invisible war between women and men that we are witnessing, on the contrary, it is the most organic, natural-laws-inspired wisdom you can find in a gender-oriented literature.
Producer to Producer – an amazing practical book on the indie filmmaking by Maureen Ryan, and Mihailo Pupin’s From Immigrant to Inventor, special to me for sharing the same place of origin with this world-known physicist and same destination of pursuing dreams, so it is sort of an emotional/career guide for me.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.saramarkovicsara.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sippy_kishitsa/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/saramarkovicsara
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sara-markovic-11a992221/
- Other: https://vimeo.com/user14886034
Image Credits
Rudo Baranovic Dusan Rajic Matija Munjiza Petrovic Lazar Bogdanovic Isabel Miranda Sara Markovic
