Private Project

Alone Together

Alone Together is a film project experimenting with new ways of making cinema during the times of COVID19, exploring new ways of filming at a time when making movies was heavily restricted.
The project follows the story of an Amsterdam teenager living during the pandemic lock down. As days go by, a strange life emerges in the limited space of her bedroom: online graduation parties with Hong Kong, long distance love affairs, a mysterious Dream Hunter speaking through her screen, a tap dancer in the top of a tram with a message to deliver, strange memories of odd people in a camper van of her childhood garden, and curious digital postcards from the other side of the world. Meanwhile life outside also grows progressively strange and surreal, The outer world emerges either as dream or as memory, as if past, future and the oneiric have mixed and run wild in the Present Reality…

  • Vanja Dimitrova
    Director
  • Vanja Dimitrova
    Writer
  • Vanja Dimitrova
    Producer
  • Maeve Mcnab
    Key Cast
    "Maeve"
  • Project Type:
    Experimental, Feature, Short, Web / New Media, Other
  • Runtime:
    40 minutes
  • Completion Date:
    March 29, 2021
  • Production Budget:
    3,000 EUR
  • Country of Origin:
    Netherlands
  • Country of Filming:
    Netherlands
  • Language:
    English
  • Shooting Format:
    Black Magic 4K, Drone, Zoom, VR
  • Aspect Ratio:
    16:9
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    No
  • Student Project:
    No
  • AltFF Alternative Film Festival
    Toronto
    Canada
    December 29, 2021
    North American
    Best Experimental
  • Reale Film Festival
    Milano
    Italy
    November 30, 2021
    European
    Best Original Idea
  • Paris Women Festival

    April 5, 2022
    Best short Experimental
  • Monza Film Fest

    September 1, 2022
    Best Experimental Film
  • Hamburg Film Awards

    April 3, 2022
    Finalist
  • Red Movie Awards

    January 23, 2023
    Oficial Selection
Director Biography - Vanja Dimitrova

Vanja Dimitrova is a Visual Artist and Film Maker from Macedonia. Completed her studies at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie for Art at the Audio Visual Department and gained a Masters Degree in Fine Arts from the Sandberg Instituut, both academies located in Amsterdam, where she now works and lives.

Selected for the Berlin Film Festival, Berlin Talent Campus, with the animation Birdy.

Her short film Absence was shot on 35mm, stared Tom Hoffman and was shown on numerous international film Festivals.

Her documentary Locked Storms, filmed in the Woman’s Correctional Prison and a Psychiatric hospital in Macedonia, premiered at the Manaki Brothers International Cinematographers Film Festival and shown at ZagrebDox Film Festival, Croatia, Eastern Neighbours Film Festival, The Netherlands..

She made the film Alone Together, which is one of the few films in the world, made during the first wave of Corona pandemic and now its going to be shown on film festivals.

Selected for the New Dutch Photography talent 2020.

Vanja Dimitrova also worked on other film productions, as Casting Director, Assistant Director, Set Decorator and Mood Book Designer.
Her body of work consists of photography, installations, video art, with which she has participated on numerous exhibitions and festivals.

And now she is writing her next film...

Add Director Biography
Director Statement

Not your usual film... Written, produced and finished in only 4 months... In the time, of Corona pandemic, when making films was having a full stand still. We were making Alone Together the film, shot in Amsterdam and Hong Kong, with different shooting formats and edited online with Macedonia...and it is a damn good film...
This was a very challenging project with a lot of limitations and unpredictable situations. Filming through online chat platforms proved to be a colossal challenge, as dominating the different views and settings took hours of practice, and the cast had to move and position their “cameras’ when acting. Making this film in only three months, put a huge strain on the international team of collaborators worked, filmed in Amsterdam and Hong Kong edited online with Skopje, yet everyone was given a total freedom of creativity and imagination, resulting in a film with different artistic layers.
The pandemic shaped this project in more than one way. The whole idea at the beginning seemed almost impossible to be achieved, but we all wanted to experiment and challenge ourselves to make it possible, knowing that the art process and experience that we go through by making it, was so important… and We Made It…