Stefan Pavlović’s Towards where to breathe (2026) and Alice Diop’s Towards Tenderness (2016) are presented together in a special double bill at Now Instant.
Towards Where to Breathe
A voice drifts through water, air, and memory. Words are uttered, hesitate, and return again altered. A father swimming, whales rising for breath, a child suspended between floating and flying. Videotape images repeat, as if blocked from continuing. Searching for a way through fractured language, as if to try to let the memories breathe.
Stefan Pavlović (b. 1989) is an award-winning filmmaker based between Amsterdam, Bosnia and the US. Often starting from his own stutter, he explores questions of language and memory in his films, working towards a type of dysfluent cinema: films that hesitate, repeat and return altered.
His debut feature, Looking for Horses (2021), screened at more than forty international film festivals and won fifteen awards. Among them are the Best Feature Award in the Burning Lights competition at Visions du Réel, the Special Jury Award at Sarajevo Film Festival, the Grand Prix at RIDM and the Golden Key at Kasseler Dokfest.
Stefan received the Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds Documentary Stipend in 2021 and was selected for Berlinale Talents in 2022. He holds a BA in Film Directing from ArtCenter College of Design in Los Angeles and an MA in Artistic Research in and through Cinema from the Netherlands Film Academy.
He is currently developing his second feature, Stuttering Fluidity – How My Father Became a Sea Creature, with Koštana Banović at Stichting artTrace (NL) and Eyal Sivan at Les Films Serendipity (FR).
Towards Tenderness
The cruelties, hypocrisies and vulnerabilities of toxic masculinity come under the microscope in Towards Tenderness, Diop’s compassionate but clear-eyed study of four men living in the banlieues of Paris: Régis, Rachid, Patrick and Anis. Having gained her subjects’ trust well before embarking on the production, Diop elicits intimate and wide-ranging confessions over a microphone and pairs these voiceover ruminations with restaged footage from everyday life in which the swaggering behaviors and poses on display often run counter to the ideas being expressed verbally. The director is again an active participant during the interviews, guiding the men toward self-reckoning with questions that dare them to examine the root sources of their often misogynistic attitudes toward women and their anxieties around the giving and receiving of love. Far more than a gotcha-style exposé, Towards Tenderness digs deeply into four troubled psyches to reveal a broader portrait of the developmental challenges embedded within a low-income, immigrant-heavy milieu.
Alice Diop (b. 1979, Aulnay-sous-Bois, France) is a French filmmaker of Senegalese descent. After studying history and visual sociology, she trained in documentary filmmaking at La Fémis in Paris. Her work explores questions of identity, representation, and belonging, with particular attention to the lives and experiences of marginalized communities in contemporary French society. Her films include La Mort de Danton (2011), La Permanence (2016), Towards Tenderness (2016), which won the César Award for Best Short Film, and We (2021), which received the Best Film award in the Encounters section of the Berlin International Film Festival. Her first fiction feature, Saint Omer (2022), won the Silver Lion Grand Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival. Her recent work includes the short film Fragments for Venus (2025).
Please note: seating for the screening is limited. Box Office opens thirty minutes prior to the listed showtime. Guests may add their name to the standby list upon arrival. Online ticket sales will be honored up until 15 minutes after the scheduled showtime; at that time, any unclaimed seats will be released for in-store purchase on a first-come, first-served basis. All Sales Final.
