Bridge Listener

by Miha Mazzini

Poslušalka mostov, fiction, digital DCP, 2,39:1/2,35:1, 25, c
In progress

Hana lives alone and maintains the family tradition of roadside innkeeping, which no one needs anymore because the traffic was diverted to the highway. One day she gets a guest, a woman with a profession she didn't know existed. The listener of bridges came to listen to the highway bridge, but she will hear everything else, even the darkest secrets.

screenwriter
Miha Mazzini
director
Miha Mazzini
producer
Slađana Vide
co-producer
Janez Kovič
executive producer
Nena Janković
director of photography
Jure Černec
production designer
Nina Rojc
costume designer
Polonca Valentinčič
key make-up artist
Tina Prpar
sound designer
Julij Zornik

featuring
Mojca Funkl, Alja Krhin

production
Solsticij
in collaboration with
Film Studio Viba Film
co-funding
Slovenian Film Centre

Solsticij
Slađana Vide
sladana@solsticij.si

Miha Mazzini is a writer with more than 30 published books and translations into 14 languages. One of his short stories won the US Pushcart Prize in 2012. He is also a screenwriter and filmmaker of award-winning short and feature films (his last feature film Erased among others won the best screenplay at Raindance Film Festival in the UK and it has been taken on by HBO and ZDF/ARTE). He grew up with a grandmother who was seeing ghosts and souls, angels and devil and a mother who was Stalin in a skirt. That’s why his novels and films deal with what others do (or pretend) not see and with people who have found themselves without rights in the clutches of bureaucracy or under the attack of the angry mob. He has a PhD in anthropology.

“In 2018, when the bridge in Genoa collapsed, I was following the news closely, and they featured a man who spoke about how he had been monitoring the bridge for years, sending warnings that were ultimately ignored. The TV station referred to him as a "Bridge Listener." This struck me and made me think about how water dripping, if persistent enough, can eventually erode concrete—hidden, gradual, and unstoppable. It led me to reflect on change, which brought me to the idea of frozen people. On social media, if you pay attention, you’ll notice that the same people post the same comments on the same topics over and over again. Isn’t that a form of being stuck? Slowly, a story began to form in my mind—of mourning, suspended somewhere in the middle, frozen on the internet. And of a person who comes, listens, hears this grief and stagnation, and tries to move it with exactly what he knows best: sound. For nearly a century, we’ve had sound in film, but in The Bridge Listener, sound is not just an addition—it is the very heart of the story.”

Solsticij is a Ljubljana based producton company mainly involved in production of short fiction films and documentaries. Working with permanent team of writers and directors Solsticij established a highly professional network of collaborators - artsts with natonal and internatonal acclaim - supporting projects that reflect various approaches to storytelling.