Artistic Differences returns with a conversation featuring filmmaker Dane Komljen, whose latest film The Garden Cadences continues his poetic exploration of collectivity, intimacy, and impermanence. Hosts Cíntia Gil and Christopher Allen reflect with Komljen on a work that unfolds between reality and reverie — an evocation of a Berlin garden where friendship, love, and artistic labor entwine against the backdrop of a disappearing communal space.

Komljen shares the film’s origins in the city’s transient communities and its quiet attention to care, routine, and coexistence. The discussion moves fluidly between the philosophical and the personal, touching on ideas of paradise and exile, the fragility of utopian spaces, and the bittersweet beauty of endings. He speaks about the film’s haunting voiceovers — one drawn from a friend’s poem, another from his own WhatsApp messages written in a moment of heartbreak, revealing how private language and loss become collective expressions within the film’s delicate structure.

Throughout, the hosts and filmmaker consider the relationship between continuity and rupture, between tenderness and distance, and how a garden can hold the traces of both. As Komljen notes, recording his own voice became a way to "be there in the film, you know, to inscribe myself.”Listen in for a gentle yet piercing exchange on the politics of care, the poetics of community, and the quiet persistence of beauty in a world of endings.And don’t forget! You can watch The Garden Cadences too! It’s now streaming on the UnionDocs Membership.Big thanks to our incredible team:

Editor: Alison Rodgers

Mixer: Pedro Castro 

Music: Andres Simoes 

Production Support: Tara Aliya Kesavan, A.S.M Kobayashi 

This is a production of UnionDocs Center for Documentary Art. ARTISTIC DIFFERENCES is co-curated and co-organized by Cíntia Gil, Christopher Allen & Jenny Miller.