Among all writers from former Yugoslavia, Joža Horvat is considered the closest in character to Ernest Hemingway. Writer, filmmaker, dreamer, adventurer, antifascist activist, former partisan, and the first man from former Yugoslavia to circumnavigate the globe on the private sailboat. Besa, sailing diary from his trip around the world, named after Horvat’s eponymous  boat – meaning the Albanian word for oath, word of honor – became an enormous best selling hit in former Yugoslavia, with over ten reprints. In the Cold War era, the sailing boat Besa was the first privately owned boat from a communist country that sailed out of territorial waters and to the seas. The cult book was a celebration of freedom, and gave the Yugoslav people the permission to dream. The book that was translated into several languages remains greatly popular today, and a veritable bible for every sailor and sea traveler in the region.

Reckoning at sea – Besa, 1965, undercuts a seafaring adventure with a Greek-tragedy style drama. Its framing through the lens and voice of a woman cinematographer allow for a new perspective on a classically male adventure genre. Documents thus deconstructs the narrative codes and the fictions of masculinity which structured the adventure genre.

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We are working on complete digital archive of many visual and written artifacts that Horvat’s family left behind. Our creative approach to cine-memoir pays only fleeting regard to documentary naturalism rules. As Akira Kurosawa put it: “It’s the power of memory that gives rise to the power of imagination.”