Going on honeymoon after a wedding is a common thing, but it is rare for couples to choose to spend their honeymoon on the road for a year, traveling the world and exploring new cultures. Davor and Anđela Rostuhar decided on such an endeavor, combined business with pleasure and embarked on the adventure of a lifetime. In one year they travelled through twenty-seven countries, interviewed about one hundred and twenty couples, and produced Love Around the World, a project whose purpose was to show different forms of love. Davor and Anđela made a film and published a book of the same name, and last night the Karlovac locals had the opportunity to enjoy the screening of the film by the river Korana. We talked to Anđela Rostuhar about the film, the trip, love and their following projects!
I’m sure you’ve answered the question What is love? innumerable times over the last few months.
(laughs) I have.
We’ll try to rephrase the question a bit; what does marriage mean to you?
When we embarked on this adventure, Davor and I had just gotten married, and I thought love was the same as falling in love; butterflies, excitement, tolerance, and so on. However, when we started our travels and started spending entire days together, we faced some challenges and we needed to compromise a lot more, more than we might have expected to in our first year of marriage. It was then that I realized that love is something completely different; it may be infatuation, but there is a lot of work to be done, just like in marriage and any long-term relationship, partnership, however you choose to legalize or not legalize it, call it or not call it. If you want to be with someone for a long time, you have to work on that relationship, you can’t just give in and think that everything will come to you of its own accord; it takes a lot of compromise, you necessarily lose a part of yourself to create a relationship, because none of us are the same. This trip changed my perception of love as something that just happens because love is something that takes a very long time to build and you need to invest a lot of energy, effort and work into it to be good, like anything else.
The film shows many kinds of love, but some couples are very far from us culturally. How did you prepare to enter this project with completely open minds?
We’ve always tried to be very open and objective, which doesn’t mean we necessarily agree with all the couples portrayed in the film. We wanted to show what love means to different people around the world and in order for this documentary to be as objective as possible. Of course we had prejudices about some places, we all have our own set of prejudices and attitudes on certain topics. For example, I’ve always thought that arranged marriages were something that was devoid of romance and something that did not necessarily have to be love, until I visited countries where we talked to people who were in an arranged marriage and where I realized that they were in love, only that they reached that point a slightly different way. We are nurtured to fall in love first, then date, see if we are right for each other, get engaged, get married and stay together or not. They enter marriage without knowing each other, they are joined by their parents according to some parameters, they enter marriage as two strangers and then they build their love. In Iran, we interviewed a couple who got married through an arranged marriage, but after three years they were madly in love with each other, they just had a different path to it. They always say that their marriages last longer because their divorce rates are lower, which is true on paper, but divorce is also less frequent because these are countries where women do not have the right to go and divorce as we do, but there is something in the fact that they don’t choose their partner by themselves, but their whole family does. If they decide to divorce, it’s not just them who decide, but the whole family, sometimes religious leaders, tribal leaders or whoever brought them together, who try to reconcile them, find a way for them to stay together. I’ve learned to respect this because more than half the marriages in the world are arranged. Who says our way is the right one? They also think we nurture something that makes no sense in their world, they say we are attached to emotions which are fragile, have no long-term hope of survival, are transient and short lived, and then we go looking for someone else, all of which may not be so far from the truth.
In the film, several couples discuss the relationship between tradition and modernity. How did you and Davor connect the two in your relationship?
I took Davor’s last name, which may not be in line with some modern trends, but I thought it was nice, firstly for practical reasons, because we travel a lot and in some countries we would have to carry a wedding certificate to prove we were married in order to share the same room if we didn’t have the same last name, so logistically it would be a nightmare. Secondly, if we were to have a child and it had his last name, and I travelled with him, I would have to prove it is mine with a birth certificate, and that’s all too strenuous. I also like to say that we are the Rostuhars, I like to think of us as one, because my last name doesn’t mean anything to me, I can be called “Tree” as far as I’m concerned, I’m not tied to identity or nationality, it’s not rooted in me. On the other hand, it’s nice to have an umbrella under which we build our family. That would be one example of the traditional in the modern world.
How did you find the couples you interviewed?
We had a list of stories we would like to film, made over a couple of months in Zagreb before we set off. Of course we added to it along the way, but we had a basic idea of what we wanted to find. We would always try through acquaintances first, we would see if we know someone who can help us find interesting people, we used social networks, for example Instagram where I found two lesbians from Iran because I wrote to the LGBT community there who shared that two documentary filmmakers are looking someone to talk about their relationship, then through couchsurfing, where we would write to people that we are coming to their country/city, we would send them a description of our project and hope they would be interested or know someone who fits the description. We shot very few stories at random, everything was planned. We recorded a total of one hundred and twenty interviews, there are thirty-three of them in the film, and about a hundred in the book. Everything was planned to support the diversity that we were trying to portray, both cultural and in the types of relationships, in identities; we wanted to show a whole spectrum of love.
Did you ever feel overwhelmed by the project?
Of course, in many moments (laughs). In one year we travelled to twenty-seven countries, and later we traveled through Europe. We travelled at an extremely strenuous pace; every two weeks we changed countries, sometimes more or less often, we did everything ourselves, looked for stories, filmed, processed materials, looked for translators, booked hotels, accommodation, trains, planes, arranged visas… We had a colleague in Zagreb who dealt with our Zagreb office, bookkeeping, the warehouse, orders, accounting, and she helped us however she could, but I was more or less in charge of the travel logistics. We both worked on the stories, maybe more so Davor. We carried everything in backpacks; the recording equipment, the lighting, the sound system, camping equipment, summer and winter clothes, cosmetics… Everything fit into two backpacks. Sometimes we went to countries where our conditions were awful and anything that could have gone wrong, did. For example, in India we got sick, we were running out of time, we had to film, we had tickets ready for our next destination, we had an objective and we had to travel sick. That was physically terribly strenuous and that was the moment when I first felt myself ‘cracking’. In fact, the worst moments were those when it was logistically difficult to organize our trips.
You have already held about eighty screenings on your summer tour. Do you like how the project came to life and in which direction it is going?
We are more than happy with how the project came to life. Given the circumstances of the pandemic, we didn’t even know if we were going to have a premiere, let alone a tour, but in the end it all came together nicely. We were patient with the premiere, which was held at ZagrebDox in June this year, where we won the Audience award and we couldn’t have imagined a better start than that. After that, all the screenings at the Student Centre in Zagreb were sold out, people started talking about the film, we were guests in great TV/radio shows, we gave interviews that further promoted us, people watched the film and were its biggest ambassadors because they talked about it a lot. From June until now we have had about eighty screenings, Davor and I have attended about forty of them. More or less wherever we go the screenings are sold out, people leave them smiling and talking about love and it’s wonderful. Given everything that’s going on around us, it’s nice to see people happy and know we’ve contributed to their happiness. The book is selling great, it is in the top five best-selling books this year, everything is going phenomenally and I have nothing to complain about, except that we are really tired, but everything else is amazing.
Do you have time to rest now or are you already planning further projects?
At the moment, we are travelling with the film every day for the next four weeks. In November we plan to go to Serbia and Bosnia, in December to Germany … And that is it for this year, we’ll see what happens in the next one.
(M.L.J.)
