Bonus Ep - LUCILE HADŽIHALILOVIĆ

In this bonus episode of the Pure Cinema Podcast, host and guest Lucille Haji Halilović engage in a deeply personal and poetic conversation about the films that have shaped her artistic vision over the past two decades. The discussion centers on the emotional and sensory power of cinema—how key images, moods, and soundtracks linger far longer than plot details. Haji Halilović reflects on her earliest cinematic memories, from The Sword and the Stone to her formative experiences in Paris during the 1980s, where she discovered silent cinema, French New Wave, and the avant-garde works of Dario Argento, Peter Strickland, and the Czech Surrealist wave. She emphasizes the importance of dream logic, ambiguity, and visual poetry in her own films, particularly Innocence, Evolution, Earwig, and The Ice Tower, which are now being collected in a four-disc box set by Yellow Veil Films and Severin Films. The conversation also explores her influences—from Maya Deren and Jean Epstein to John Waters and Possession—and her resistance to genre constraints, advocating instead for a cinema of imagination, dreams, and myth. Despite growing industry pressures toward commercialism and didactic storytelling, she remains committed to creating films that are open-ended, emotionally resonant, and visually transcendent. The episode concludes with a hopeful note on the future of independent cinema, especially as her body of work gains wider recognition through the upcoming box set. Haji Halilović expresses gratitude for the opportunity to share her journey and encourages audiences to experience her films in order, to witness the evolution of her artistic world. The host reflects on how her films have been a lifelong companion—dreams made visible—and celebrates the enduring power of cinema that refuses to be fully understood, instead inviting viewers to participate in its mystery. The episode is both a tribute to cinematic legacy and a manifesto for the continued relevance of dreamlike, non-narrative storytelling in a world increasingly dominated by content and data.