“I’m not worried for myself because no one can defeat me,” Gara says in “To Hold a Mountain” at a point in Petar Glomazic and Biljana Tutorov’s captivating portrait of a protector of the Montenegro highlands where there’s no evidence to the contrary. She tends to the land that’s been in her family for generations in Sinjajevina, a mountain range where she performs all the hard labor from tilling the soil for crops to shepherding herds of sheep from one side of the hills to the other that make life sustainable in such a remote area. She’s increasingly had help from her niece Nada, who is entering her teenage years, and clearly beyond having the additional set of hands around the house, it is the daughter of her late sister Mika that gives her the strength to carry on, showing her adoration whenever she can and still sleeping in the same bed together when she can’t stand to be all that far away.
Filmed over the better part of a decade to cover Mika’s formative years, “To Hold a Mountain” not only captures the girl’s growth into a woman, but the steadfast grit required of Gara to be a pillar of strength for her and the community they’re a part of as a whole when Sinjajevina is under threat of evacuation for the least worthwhile of causes as Serbia would like to designate the mountains as a military training zone. Reappropriating the land seems unnecessary for many reasons when the natural splendor that exists there seems like what people fight for in the first place, but the army can be seen engaged in battle well before it can be made official as they try to take over the UNESCO-protected area and Gara looks every bit the part of leading the resistance, riding on horseback to rally her neighbors, but with nary a gun in sight, she plans to wield the weapon of locally made cheese, which she believes will have the same ability to subdue. Her fearlessness is contagious, clearly rubbing off on Nada who can admire her self-sufficiency and confidence, and as both a leader and a film subject, you know you want to follow her anywhere.
The beauty of the landscape hits you immediately, needing no further explanation of what Gara is trying to preserve. (Although it appears you could point the camera in any direction and be overwhelmed, cinematographer Eva Kraljević still frames shots that inspire awe in the same way that Gara looks at her surroundings.) However, Glomazic and Tutorov bring it out elsewhere as they tease out the circumstances that led Gara to take care of Nada in the first place, realizing she could only depend on herself when domestic abuse at the hands of men in her extended family has had just as much of an impact in shaping her life as the land has. (As she confides in a friend, “You can defend yourself against anyone but your husband.”) At first, “To Hold a Mountain” can be potentially so obscure in this regard it can be mildly confusing when Nada refers to Gara as her mother and it isn’t exactly clear that it’s a picture of Nada’s mother Mika that’s pinned to the wall of their house and treated as a shrine, but the piecemeal approach grows to intrigue as each scene where Gara stands her ground is matched by a stray comment about how much she’s had to make up for due to violence, both within her home and as a result of national conflicts and that threat appears to be returning despite her best efforts to stave it off between the unwanted advances of the military and the unwelcome return of Nada’s father.
As much stress as this surely induces for Gara, there is a connection that Glomazic and Tutorov make between how she’s able to keep a distance from it and the film itself is able to treat pressure with the weight it deserves without ever succumbing to it as a driving force for the story, instead being far more invested in Gara’s resolve. The directors’ own commitment to seeing the story through leads to gracefully observing of the rewards of Gara’s persistence simply by looking at Nada as she ages, losing a bit of her innocence from observing the heartache that driven her aunt but also adopting her stoicism. “To Hold a Mountain” follows its lead when there are rarely any bold gestures, but the end result is mighty.
“To Hold a Mountain” does not yet have U.S. distribution. It will next screen at True/False in Columbia, Missouri.