TFTHE FILMREVIEW · 50K FRESH TAKES
Make It Happen — poster
← ALL FRESH TAKES

SOURCE-LED EDITORIAL REVIEW

Make It Happen: beyond the familiar story of coming of age.

Make It Happen · 2013

A source-led reading of Make It Happen as documentary: coming of age, creation, documented consensus, and the counterpoint that shifts the conclusion.

THE FILM EDITORIAL DESKAugust 31, 2026316 WORDS
01

THEMATIC CENTER

coming of age
02

NARRATIVE PRESSURE

creation
03

FORM

documentary
04

RECORD ANCHORS

artists · athletes · people

The record for Make It Happen yields three coordinates specific to its premise—artists, athletes, and people. That vocabulary places coming of age at the center and gives creation its dominant tension. It establishes a documentary baseline, not a borrowed score; criticism must still ask what the form does with that material.

Make It Happen brings coming of age into contact with creation through documentary. That intersection is our Fresh Take: judge the premise less by its familiarity than by how precisely that combination makes its conflict legible. The existing editorial note adds this view: A sensitive, fully inhabited film whose direction lets emotion surface with precision.

Make It Happen (2013) arrives with the coordinates of a documentaire film situated in 2010s cinema. The record credits Katarina Dević with the direction and places Vlada Marković and Tijana Šišović in the foreground. With an unusually compact form, the useful question is not to invent an invisible intention, but to notice how these documented choices shape audience expectations before the first frame.

Read as documentary, the film carries the pressure of creation. Growing up appears less as a single threshold than as a series of renunciations, experiments, and borrowed stories before finding one's own measure. The most precise critical test is therefore the human cost of the creative act beyond its result. Small scale is not a lack of ambition. It can become a method of precision, capable of turning a presence, a silence, or a hesitation into a complete narrative event.

The counterpoint asks what the adult must unlearn, rather than only what the young character still needs to acquire. Instead of asking whether the film confirms the expected story of coming of age, the sharper question is whether it changes the person, place, or institution with the power to define it. The verdict shifts when silence stops being an absence and becomes the scene's most charged decision.

THE VERDICT, REFRAMED

The wager: listen to silence with the same attention given to a plot turn. Here, coming of age changes meaning under the pressure of creation.

THE DOCUMENTARY STARTING POINT

The film features intertwined scenes of young dance troupes' performances and scenes where famous Serbian actors, artists and athletes speak out to young people, in order to inspire them to by their own example to chase after and fulfill their lives' dreams. The 34 minute long film is fast paced and shows different types of dances at several key locations in Belgrade, Serbia. The performances are cut by the interviews with the artists and athletes, addressing the viewer, who talk about their beginnings and the road to success. The third segment of the film are young people, transitioning into adulthood, who talk about what their own dreams are. The idea that the film ""Fulfill your dream!"" carries is to show young people, through the movie itself, through the testimonies of successful artists and athletes, and finally through the example of the author, that it is possible to start an independent career, thanks to their creativity, ambition and perseverance.

Original review by The Film Editorial Desk. No audience testimony or independent critic identity is fabricated.
Year
2013
Runtime
35 min
Direction
Katarina Dević
Performers
Vlada Marković · Tijana Šišović · Ana Tadić · Feđa Dimović · Katarina Dević · Boško Ćirković · Zvezdan Gavrilović · Johnny Tarzan