Ivana Horvat ’06: Life Through Her Lens

Ivana Horvat ‘06 has strong family ties to OES. Her mother, Tanja Horvat ’74, attended high school at OES and taught here. Ivana met her husband David at OES (though they didn’t start dating until several years later). And OES leaders, along with her classmates, helped bring Ivana and her mother to the United States after they fled war-torn Bosnia in the mid-90s.

“The school offered my mother a teaching position,” shared Horvat. “That enabled her to get a work visa, and we immigrated here from Germany, where we were living after we left Sarajevo.” Starting as a lab director, Tanja Horvat, MD was quickly promoted to a senior science faculty position and ended up teaching at OES for 29 years. She retired in 2022.

Today, Ivana and David live in Portland and have a nearly three-year-old son, Avi, who is doted on by Tanja and his other grandparents, including Pam Dreisin, who is the OES board vice president.

Horvat is living her lifelong dream of being a filmmaker. “When I was a child, I borrowed my dad’s camcorder and made videos,” she shared. “I’d invite friends over for birthday parties and make movies of us.”

When she was In the 10th grade at OES, Horvat took a video editing class from Jack O’Brien in the performing arts department. “That was my first exposure to video editing, something that is still one of my favorite things about the process as well as one of my key strengths,” Horvat said. Coincidentally, Ivana and David first became friends in Jack O’Brien’s drawing class, and decades later, Jack O’Brien officiated Ivana and David’s wedding.

Horvat attended Pitzer College in Southern California and graduated with a double major in media studies and psychology with honors. “I love psychology; I come from this multicultural background, and seeing things from different perspectives, transculturally, ties in with thinking about the brain and psychology. I brought that into my video work,” said Horvat.

While in college, she made her first documentary film, about transgender youth in Hollywood, a promotion for a harm reduction program. “This introduced me to the concept of using film for positive impact and social justice. Out of that came the inspiration for my own documentary work,” said Horvat. “I prefer documentaries to narrative films, because in a documentary you can go with the flow of the story and find the magic, rather than completely manufacturing it from the ground up.”

Perhaps the most personally impactful documentary Horvat has made is Finding Bosnia, about her own life, which she created 10 years ago.

“This film was created through my personal lens of going back to Bosnia for the first time since fleeing war, and connecting with this culture as an adult for the first time in my life; getting to meet my family, make friends my own age, see what it’s all about,” said Horvat. “When you hear about Bosnia in the media, it’s always about the war and the violence. But this was a joyful, soulful piece, held together with my own personal narrative arc. It’s really like a love letter to Bosnia.”

Fast forward to today, and Horvat is working as a digital media producer at Metro East Community Media. This non-profit organization makes videos and films for clients such as the Clean Rivers Coalition, for whom they made the documentary Follow the Water. Part of her role is guiding the client through the steps needed to make a successful product, including choosing who to interview on camera and how to craft your messaging. “We strive to make evocative, character-driven, impact-driven stories in our films,” said Horvat. “Video is so magical, because you can connect to people emotionally, and an emotional connection is the most important thing to create any kind of change.”

Her current project is a docuseries called Food Foray. “It’s kind of like Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown,” says Horvat. “But instead of going to different countries to learn about their food and culture, we’re going to different local international grocery stores and eating food in the homes of immigrant foodies.”

Perhaps surprisingly, those grocery stores are all located in east Multnomah County, which has a high immigrant population. “What is so cool about where I work is that it has the most diverse zip code in all of Oregon,” said Horvat. “When refugees and immigrants move here, they resettle into these neighborhoods. Portland has a lot of high profile restaurants, as one of the biggest food cities in the world, but the food you find in east Multnomah County is fresh from that country.”

The format of the show has a host touring the aisles of these immigrant-owned grocery stores with a guest from that community, who talks with the host about the food stocked there. “They’re telling the host, ‘This is the tamarind paste we use to make this soup I grew up eating,’ and ‘These are the pastries we’d eat during the fall of communism in the Republic of Georgia.’ Then they go to that immigrant foodie’s house, where they cook a meal from their culture and they sit down with their friends and family to discuss geopolitics, identity, and immigration, love and humor,” said Horvat.

They have made three episodes so far, featuring people from the Republic of Georgia; Oaxaca, Mexico; and Myanmar (formerly Burma).

“It’s been so cool seeing Food Foray come alive on screen after working on it for three years,” continued Horvat. “Having it go from a conversation about the interesting international markets near our office in Gresham while eating piroshkis from the Russian grocery store during lunch at work, to a couple of words written on some pages outlining our idea for grant funding, to visiting authentic international immigrant-owned markets that sold goods I’d never seen before like dried jellyfish and betel leaves, to holding a casting call to find a host and having them take walks down grocery store aisles we constructed in our studio pretending to talk about items on the shelves that were actually just boxes and boxes of Cheerios, to actually getting to shoot inside the homes of our immigrant guests and edit the episodes for months and months until we went on to the next guest, the next country, to seeing it on screen! It's been a wild ride and I'm extremely proud of what we've accomplished.”

A screening of Food Foray is the perfect springboard for events that explore immigration, culture, food, geopolitics, or DEI initiatives. Ivana is currently working on planning more screenings at local organizations to facilitate connecting to these topics through food. She is also trying to fund future episodes (next up are Vietnam, Syria, and Nepal). If you’d like to get involved, you can email her at iamivanahorvat@gmail.com.

Horvat looked back on what she has accomplished so far and reflected on what she has experienced.

“The most fulfilling part about the filmmaking process is being surprised by how many different ways people can relate to a documentary I work on. After I made Finding Bosnia, I was in awe of how many people across the world were reaching out to me to share their stories. I’m not even talking Bosnian diaspora, but people from all nationalities. I remember sitting at a bar outside of the Clinton Street Theater after one of our screenings and just having conversation after conversation with strangers one after another who were telling me about their grandparents who were from France and how that culture was passed down to them, or about how they could relate growing up in war because they were Palestinian, or how they were adopted and could relate to my struggle searching from my identity. The list goes on. I remember I’d get this excited buzzing in my chest which made me feel like I was onto something much much bigger than myself and my little story. I loved the feeling of the connectedness it gave me and opened my eyes to the incredible power that film has.”

Find links to interviews and more about Horvat on her website.