When Filmmaker Ris Igrec is Stuck, They Rake Leaves
On creative stagnation, embodiment, and making art without forcing it.
Ris Igrec is a Croatian-American filmmaker and video artist whose work investigates culture, coming of age, and the interplay between the physical and the digital. In 2025, Ris has focused on multimedia works that reflect the fragile nature of memory and the inevitable obsolescence of time-based media. Their work has been exhibited at ISOVIST, the gallery within Yale’s Center for Collaborative Arts and Media, including I hold it towards you, a group exhibition guest curated by Fabiola Alondra. They hold a B.A. in Film & Media Studies from Yale University.
EY: When do you remember first becoming interested in the camera?
RI: My dad has always been the kind of person who picks something up really intensely for a few months and then drops it entirely – and I definitely inherited that. When I was a kid, he made these elaborately edited home videos in a documentary style. I grew up watching them and being completely fascinated by the camera.
He would sometimes disappear on the weekends, and I’d ask where he was, and it turned out he was editing. Part of the reason he made those videos was for my family in Croatia. He’d send them DVDs so they could see what we were up to. There were text overlays, maps – everything – explaining exactly where we went and what we did.
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EY: I’m really drawn to the idea of the family archivist – who preserves memory and how those records resurface later. There’s something so powerful about stumbling upon those documents.
EY: How did YouTube enter the picture? I remember your early videos being deeply connected to your Croatian upbringing and identity.
RI: It really clicked when my older cousins sat me down when I was about six and said, “This is YouTube.com.” I thought it was the greatest thing in the world. As soon as I was old enough to operate a camera, I begged my teachers to let me make videos instead of written projects.
Eventually, I got tired of just talking to myself on camera, so I started making experimental videos alone in my room. By high school, I was writing actual scripts and thinking about filmmaking more seriously.
EY: Why do you think people resonated so strongly with those videos? Your storytelling feels very natural.
RI: I’m an only child, so I spent a lot of time alone – sometimes literally talking to the walls. I’d imagine stories I’d tell people if they were there. That gave me a lot of time to edit, to refine.
The camera became an extension of that. Talking to the lens feels like there’s a friend there, but the friend is also me. It’s like someone is looking back at you and responding in some subtle way.
I’m remembering now that in middle school, I used to tell scary stories during recess. I’d gather everyone around and tell them about haunted game cartridges I read about online. I think that impulse never really left.
EY: You now have over 140,000 subscribers. What was it like when your audience started growing?
