“If a Lion Could Speak, It Would Tell Wittgenstein to Stop with Human Exceptionalism”: An Interview with Quenton Miller

The credits of Quenton Miller’s Koki, Ciao (2025, 11’), which list a cockatoo as a narrator and co-writer, bear no trace of irony. Centred on the cockatoo Koki, who once belonged to Yugoslavia’s President Josip Broz Tito, Miller’s short pushes the non-human perspective to bring an animal’s direct contribution into the creative process. Contemporary footage of the speaking cockatoo veteran, on display for tourists in his cage on Brijuni Islands, Croatia, alternates with archival black-and-white photographs showing Tito, his spouse Jovanka Broz, luminaries of the Non-Aligned Movement such as Indonesia’s Sukarno, and film stars visiting Tito’s Yugoslavia, Sophia Loren and Orson Welles among them. The words pronounced by Koki, often literally illustrated with photographs, dictate the content and the editing pace while creating an estrangement effect. At a time of heightened interest both in decentring the human gaze and the political and cultural legacy of the Non-Aligned Movement, Koki, Ciao strikes a fine balance between aesthetic experimentation and topics of historical significance. I sat with the director Quenton Miller, who was awarded the Berlinale Shorts CUPRA Filmmaker Award at this year’s Berlinale, where Koki, Ciao premiered. We discussed the research and filming process, the formal techniques used in the film, animal perspectives in cinema and literature, and his literary background.

 – N.R.

Koki, Ciao. Archival photograph of Koki and Josip Broz Tito. Courtesy of Quenton Miller/Museum of Yugoslavia.

To begin with, can you tell me something about the research that went into this film? How did you work with Koki? What was the filming and recording process like? 

At first, I came in with a script, but it didn’t stick. Koki wouldn’t say some of what I wrote while being very focused on things that weren’t in my story, so we followed his lead. I had written stories around Indonesia, where I assumed Koki had been gifted from, but it didn’t get much response. Meanwhile Koki had other ideas, like poodles stealing his attention, so we gave these things the significance they had within his life. Along with words, we focused on capturing emotional responses in the evocation of different memories.

What about the archival work?

The archives went both ways: The material was a Rosetta stone to understand Koki’s words, and at other times the archive material was something to show Koki to get his response. Fortunately, Koki is very used to people playing videos for him on their phones, and very responsive to images and sounds. This is something common among parrots, from budgies socialising with flat screens to African Greys doing video calls. Koki is very familiar with the top results of Tito on YouTube and TikTok, but there are hundreds of thousands of photos and other materials that he’d never seen, so I went back and forth between archives and Koki’s cage, bringing Koki new material. Sometimes he hit on something alone.

Koki guides us through many scenes of the history of socialist Yugoslavia. Why was this non-anthropocentric perspective essential to you? What can such points of view teach us about (Yugoslav) history?

I love this idea from Jacques Derrida that humans can only define themselves as human in relation to animals. On Brijuni—an island national park filled with diplomatic animal gifts that arrived during the Non-Aligned Movement—there is a mystical intersection between the borders of species and the borders of states. Both in the way the construction of national identity is often done through something as childish as identifying with an animal in your area, but there is also something more mysterious going on that I can’t put my finger on. I often work with historical or politically loaded material in a fluid way, so in answer to your question I have more openings than closings: It was an effort to decentre the human and experience territory, dominion and emotions which doesn’t have clear human learnings or symbolise anything. Many people have asked whether repetition and stuck time are conscious metaphors in the film, but I think this interpretation of animal language is unfair to parrots. There is something in Koki’s performance that in a human actor would be called “emotional memory”.

The snapshot effect of the photographs is aligned with Koki’s fragmented narration. But there is also a film excerpt – a piece of archival footage showing Tito and Koki. Why did you decide to include this bit of footage?

Initially, we considered leaving the audience with a long shot of Koki in his cage at night, looking miserable, with a rat wandering in the background, but it wasn’t sad enough. In this closing footage, Tito’s lips are moving but there’s no audio and, unlike the rest of the film, we kept it mute. There’s an obvious affinity between Tito and Koki, but also a painful distance across time that goes over the border of knowability, meaning and death. Coincidentally, as Koki’s eyeline rises to see Tito, the film stops just before Koki can establish eye contact with the big ghost. Koki’s ending is tragic, we wanted to end on the most tragic shot – this was it.

Koki, Ciao. Koki on display for tourists. Courtesy of Quenton Miller.

The contemporary scenes show Koki in his cage on Brijuni Islands, surrounded by tourists or singing “melancholically”. Did these moments bear symbolism in your view, or were you mostly interested in the parrot and his daily life?

Definitely the latter, we wanted to de-symbolise animals. On Brijuni islands, where Koki is located, there are these very symbolic animals that arrived as gifts between states. They’re all the sort of wild animals you might see on passports but with sad lives beyond their diplomatic function. As well as states, we noticed that many film festivals also use animals as symbols, and made a trailer where we stay with the animal logos for an uncomfortably long time with speculative voice-overs. It’s like the MGM lion in the moments before and after its iconic roar, getting confused in lion time. A few people even called it a sound trailer. Even when the animals don’t use phonetic sounds in familiar order, the emotions still come across. We tried to balance our emotional responses with research, not to fall in the trap, for example, of the numerous films that use calls of the common loon to express a haunting sadness to human ears, whereas to loons these calls mean something completely different.

Can you maybe comment on the fact that, for all the decentring of the human perspective, Koki, Ciao remains very much anthropocentric? Not only is it obviously a work of humans, including Koki’s narration being interpreted and cinematically transformed by you and your team, but the techniques used (archival footage, captions, observation…) barely suggest an animal’s point of view.

I don’t really worry about anthropomorphism – I think it’s a risk worth taking, especially in a time when our relationship with “nature” is becoming weird. This might be because I come from literature, so I’m always trying to modulate formats and vibes to go into other perspectives and ideas. Trying to depict and experience the world from the point of view of another human is already science-fictional to me, so why not go a bit further and go into the life of a bird? Having somewhat diverse perceptions, I understand Brecht’s idea of the alienation effect literarily – as if he’s talking about aliens coming from outer space to portray humans on stage. Formats and mode of address are never neutral. Maybe it’s because I never went to film school, so I learned to pick up things from my collaborators, but I also reject a lot of things, like this idea that long shots and minimal editing might have more direct access to reality.

I don’t agree with Wittgenstein when he says “If a lion could speak, we would not be able to understand it.” Who is this “we”? Humans and other animals and their languages all evolved in relation to each other. If a lion could speak, it would tell Wittgenstein to stop with human exceptionalism. So, my relation to animals is both speculative as well as very close to home. My favourite scene in all cinema is in Bresson’s Au hasard Balthazar (1966) – where the donkey Balthazar interacts with a tiger, polar bear, chimpanzee and an elephant in shot and reverse shot. The language and rhythm from this back-and-forth could be taken from a screwball comedy, but the effect is so much more because it relates to real emotional responses from the animals.

There are some great recent animal films like Carlos Casas’ Cemetery (2019) and Andrea Arnold’s Cow (2021) which follow animal experience without falling into the objectifying violence that happens in more traditional nature “documentaries”. Koki, Ciao was definitely informed by these films, but with a different starting point. I wanted to start with animal narration, and my obsession with books narrated by animals like Virginia Woolf’s Flush, Kafka’s animal stories, Yoko Tawada’s Memoirs of a Polar Bear, or many children’s animations, and to find a new way to do animal literature with the real voice of a speaking bird.

I think of narration as something only secondarily about story. Before you can get to a story there’s a narrative mode of address that needs to be modulated to shape who can be heard and how. One of the things I enjoy about art film is having more time to test this before jumping into the business of telling the story. It took a while in the editing room before we arrived at a narrator’s contract between Koki and human ears, and perhaps it’s still too uncanny for some humans. On the island, when Koki says “come here,” sometimes people do, other times they just say “haha, sounds like he said come here.” Though I often, technically, make comedies, I think of laughter here as a defence mechanism at the border between human and non-human. Though the film might not seem like much on a laptop, in screenings I’ve enjoyed seeing humans collectively try to make sense of Koki’s voice in a noisy cinema. The way you describe experiencing the films reminds me of Kafka’s animal narrators, which are not strictly animals, they’re more like a complicated mess of human and animal intertwined, and, like most of us, are failing in their aspiration to become fully human.

Koki, Ciao. One of Koki’s sayings. Courtesy of Quenton Miller.

Speaking of literature and narration, why have you decided to divide the film into intertitle-marked chapters/sections? It seems unusual for such a short film.

Everything points to literature for me – I think it’s something to do with not taking empathy for granted. But also in a practical way, these titles were a chance to cheat our own system. We made a format where every sentence or word Koki says is matched up with an archival image. Some of Koki’s more impressive sayings didn’t have a pairing and I still wanted to show them.

At one point, you incorporate an email from Tito’s granddaughter Saša Broz who argues that the Koki you are filming is not the Koki that belonged to Tito. How essential was this piece of information to you? Could you verify it? Were there some other similar “twists” during your research and production?

I got this reply from Saša a long time after I wrote to her, midway through editing. Saša took Koki from the Brijuni cage and adopted him for many years, but cockatoos are undomesticated and a lot of work; they can be incredibly loud and can turn tables to woodchips, so eventually Koki was too much work for Saša and he was returned to Brijuni. This means she would definitely know who is and isn’t the original Koki. 

I know the bird I filmed definitely has an emotional attachment to Tito. It’s likely Tito had more than one cockatoo. But then there are many possibilities: A The Talented Mr Ripley scenario, a new Koki could have learned everything from trainers or by mirroring everything addressed to him by history tourists. At first, I was concerned this email would sink the project, but in the end I think this unknowability makes the work stronger, as Koki keeps his opacity and room to move.

In academia and beyond, there have been debates on the ethical use of archival images, as researchers and practitioners ask (themselves): Who do images belong to, who has the opportunity and the right to use them, and to what purpose? How do you reflect on your position as a “foreign” filmmaker working with Yugoslav archives? How helpful and reassuring—beyond their actual creative and technical contribution—was the fact that you were surrounded by many “local” collaborators? 

The archives are Koki’s memories, and the film started with a focus on Koki, human-animal communication, and the way animals are instrumentalised for the construction of national identity and symbols of power. I was born in Australia where big groups of sulphur-crested cockatoos like Koki roam the streets as well as being on some passports and official documents. Koki was gifted, possibly via Indonesia (which also identifies with cockatoos), to this zoo on Brijuni of world animals, as part of the international diplomacy of the international Non-Aligned Movement. Lanka, an elephant received from Indira Gandhi, also features in the film, and on Brijuni there are also zebras who I think came as gifts by Sékou Touré and Shetland ponies from the British queen. Animal diplomacy and the instrumentalisation of these poor animals as near-magical symbols of power are very transnational, yet the trauma of what came after Tito’s death does hang over these images.

There’s something about animals and power (their presence and what they leave behind) that, along with a commitment to Koki, kept me fired up to work on this project for so long, but it’s a literary film, not a documentary. While some of my works are called “documentary”, I don’t even think people should be allowed to use the term “documentary” as a noun.

I have struggles with perception and language that inform my approach to filmmaking, and even when making work about my “home”, there is a level of disorientation I like, leading to characters who render nationhood absurd. Most of my favourite films and books are from alienated perspectives, but there’s a fine line between alienation and ignorance, and no clear-cut formula for navigating this. Of course, collaborating with locals helped, as well as hanging out with local historians and archivists, and working over many years with (former) Yugoslavian friends around, who weren’t just going along with whatever I said, which might not be the case on a professional and fast-paced production. 

Koki, Ciao. Sophia Loren meeting Koki. Courtesy of Quenton Miller/Museum of Yugoslavia.

Your artistic portfolio features a wide array of experimental projects, often at the intersection of various disciplines or leaning toward expanded media or transmediality. Was the conventional (short) film format of Koki, Ciao a productive constraint or did you feel limited by it? 

My background is in writing. After dropping out of a writing for media degree I fell into making films and publications in art contexts. It’s a great place to play with language and context, but it also theorises and conceptualises everything very quickly, which for someone who puts their heart on screen can feel a little vampiric.

Cinema and literature have always been my big love, and they are the historical projects I try to build on. When you make film installations in an art context, not only do you make the film, you make your own format, your own little cinema installation space, your own clock on the wall moving at your own speed, your own audience and context, and you have the possibility to displace a kind of performativity and speculation from the story to the world at large. Like many artist-filmmakers, my previous projects try to engage political, legal, and journalistic frameworks outside of what’s caught on celluloid. But it doesn’t easily cut down to a single-channel version that works in any given cinema.

For the first time with Koki, Ciao, I committed in advance to the linear time and singular space of the cinema, so I could focus on the rhythm and duration of film. Around this time, I was diagnosed and treated for ADHD (Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder), so this newfound focus could be chemical. I also worked with an amazing editor on this project, Misho Antadze, who is more classically trained and was important in holding together my freewheeling ideas of form. After this project, even though it’s a painfully difficult and uncertain process to contain everything to a cinema frame and tell ideas in time, I can’t imagine working any other way.

Do you plan to tackle a similar film project in the future?

I have a few films in development. My next one works with both macaque monkeys and humans on a sci-fi story. Like Koki, Ciao, it plays with format to decentre humans, combining animated speculative fiction and “nature documentary”, a form I find both ridiculous and violent in the terminal time of the Anthropocene. I hope it has legs to make it to feature length. I think short films can be relatively unrestrained. Still, when you need to keep someone sitting for 90 minutes of human chronos time before releasing them with a sense of resolution, that’s when these well-worn conventions and commitment to cinema as cinema come into play, so I’ll wait for my next film before answering your question about constraints.

Quenton Miller and Nikola Radić would like to thank Luka Barajević, the film’s sound designer, for his insights offered during the preparation of this interview.