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The 1997 Toronto International Film Festival

Yugoslav filmmaker:

"The nation is only an instrument of manipulation"

By David Walsh
22 September 1997

The 1997 Toronto film festival featured a special program of films from the Balkan countries, a number of which treated the breakup of the former Yugoslavia and the ensuing war in the region. Those catastrophic events have resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths and turned millions into refugees. Treating them artistically, particularly under conditions of the great political confusion caused principally by Stalinism, is not an easy task.

Among the Balkan films Zoran Solomun's Tired Companions, made in Germany in 1996, stood out for its intelligence, artistic clarity and critical attitude toward the tragic developments in the former Yugoslavia.

Solomun divides his film into five segments. In the first, two young women, one with a small baby, are taken off a train full of potential refugees heading for Germany at the Serbian-Hungarian border on the pretext that their Bosnian passports are no longer valid. The women, from very different social backgrounds, are simply abandoned in a freezing, deserted railroad station in the middle of the night. "I've lost everything," the more prosperous woman tells the other. The final image of the two women, and the means by which they provide comfort to one another, is devastating.

The second sequence, whose ironic introductory subtitle reads, "Our war has its good sides too," begins with the arrival of a truckload of illegal refugees in a German town. One of the women asks the driver suspiciously, "Are you Serbian?" As he drives away, the man replies: "My nationality is the deutschmark." A refugee, who has fled with his son, encounters a childhood classmate, a bourgeois Croat, who has obviously prospered in her new country. During their conversation her nationalist venom emerges. After promising the man a lift to Berlin, she takes advantage of an incident at school, about which she still harbors a grudge, to leave him in the lurch.

The only advice of the profiteering driver to the refugees had been: to avoid suspicion, try to act like Germans. At one point, the refugees' son drops a bagful of apples on the ground. Anxiously he asks his father: what would Germans do, would they pick up the apples?

The film is not simply about the consequences of the war in the former Yugoslavia. It is also a film about Germany and the attitude of the Germans toward the victims of the conflict. In the third section, entitled "We are doing really well here," two refugees try to interest a German newspaper in doing a piece about the horrifying experiences one of them has had in a Serb concentration camp. In the end an editor, complacent and indifferent, explains that his paper has done an expose on the camp a few weeks before and that "It's no longer current." The camp victim hangs himself in a refugee shelter.

The fourth segment takes place in and around an Orthodox Church in a German city. The local Serb nationalists are organizing an exhibition commemorating war crimes committed against Serbia during World War II. A young man enters and prostrates himself on the floor. He explains to a middle-aged man, who has been living in Germany for 30 years: "I wasn't praying. I was just trying to get attention. Then I won't have to think about death." He is a deserter from the Yugoslav army. The sight and smell of a busload of dead civilians has been too much for him.

The two go to a Serb club, decorated with nationalist paraphernalia. The older man is bitter. For years he has worked like a dog in Germany and now the house he financed and built in Yugoslavia has been burnt to the ground. "Thirty years of work for nothing." Drunk, full of self-pity, he complains, "The whole world hates us Serbs." Back at the church, he reveals doubts about his identity and the meaning of his life to a priest. The priest responds, " What are you? A Serb, what else?"

In the final sequence, which takes place after peace has been restored, the family of the man who hanged himself is returning to the former Yugoslavia with his coffin. When her son speaks in German, the man's widow says, "Forget German. Fuck Germany."

In a bar near the border the driver, the profiteer in the previous sequence, has business to conduct. He leads the bar's patrons, composed of returning refugees, in a strange dance, directing them when to move and when to freeze. Solomun explained, at the screening of his film, that this was intended as a criticism of the passivity of the Yugoslav population, its willingness to be manipulated by governments and nationalist leaders.

The events of the film are grim enough, but it is made with genuine sympathy for people and does not give in to easy cynicism or despair. The role of form comes into play here. Solomun's political perspective may be limited, but in its elegance and precision, Tired Companions demonstrates the capacity of human beings to go beyond the tragedies depicted.

In a conversation, I asked Solomun, who has lived in Germany since 1990, whether he thought it would have been possible, politically or psychologically, to make a film so hostile to nationalism in one of the republics of the former Yugoslavia. "It would be very difficult to make something like this in ex-Yugoslavia," he replied. "It would be almost impossible."

In the festival catalog Solomun, who was born in Croatia and lived most of his life in Belgrade, was quoted as having said, "Everyone in the Balkans who defines himself as a nationalist is my enemy." I asked him about the comment. He explained: "This statement was my emotional reaction to something concrete. It was a report by an American journalist about what some of these criminals had done in Bosnia. At that moment it was very, very difficult emotionally to confront the fact that something like this was happening in my country.

"My reaction was that anyone who considers himself a Serbian, a Croatian was my enemy. Later I qualified this statement. Enemy is a very hard word. I am politically engaged against every form of nationalism. If you say today in the Balkans I'm Serb, it means you are siding with Milosevic, if you say you are Croat you are supporting the policies of Tudjman. It is a political program with very, very clear aims."

Solomun continued: "The nation as a category is only an instrument of manipulation. It had perhaps some positive political aspects in the last century and the beginning of this century, but not any more. I cannot any longer understand people who are proud of being Croats, Serbs, Americans or Canadians."

I noted that the North American media presented the war as the eruption of age-old and intractable national hatreds that had been bubbling beneath the surface for years.

"It is not true," Solomun responded. "In the ex-Yugoslavia there were, of course, nationalist tensions and problems, but they were not very severe. They were not stronger than anywhere else in the world. In Bosnia one-third of the marriages were between people of different ethnic backgrounds. A lot of these problems were used."

Solomun blames the war on militarism, on the need of the army and those dependent on the weapons industry to maintain a massive military. He feels that politicians and generals manipulated nationalist feelings for their own selfish ends.

What would you say, I asked, to people, including so-called left-wingers, who maintain that Bosnian or Croatian nationalism is some kind of progressive force?

Solomun commented: "I think that really progressive people, particularly after this experience in the Balkans, cannot consider themselves nationalists. They cannot define themselves nationally."

I told him that I thought the republics of the former Yugoslavia were unviable entities that would simply be manipulated by the great powers, such as the US, Germany and so on.

"They are already. They are not sovereign states, these politicians are always asking someone else what to do. I think that some of them are really stupid. They believe that the big powers are behind them. Interviewing a representative of the American government a journalist asked what the US wanted, addressing him as if he was some court of justice. And this man was very honest. He said, I'm defending the interests of the state I represent. There are a lot of people in the Balkans who think that someone else should decide in their name. That's the problem."

"There was so much confusion," I suggested, "created by Titoism, Stalinism. People were told that they were living under socialism, and that was dead, so the only alternative was capitalism. Yugoslavia was not a socialist country. The population was disarmed. They were led to believe that the golden world of the free market was their only alternative."

Solomun said, "They believed, not only in Yugoslavia, but in all of eastern Europe. And they still believe it, after six years of bitter disappointments."

I pointed out that we were speaking in a country where increasingly belligerent nationalist language was being used by political forces in both English and French Canada. "But if you say to people, look at Yugoslavia, they say: it can't happen here, we're too advanced, too civilized."

Solomun remarked: "We also thought it couldn't happen. If you'd have asked me in the winter of 1991-92, I would have said it couldn't happen. Even after Vukovar, after the war in Croatia, I was still thinking it couldn't happen. You simply couldn't believe it."

I asked him about the question of artistically representing terrible events, such as the war in the Balkans. Had he considered this problem?

"I thought about this problem a great deal," Solomun explained. "I don't know how well I've succeeded, but my decision was to make this film very simply in terms of film language, without very refined aesthetics. Of course you cannot make a film without aestheticizing something, you have to find your own language, style. I decided for something raw. It is a little bit different from the things I did before. Because, even in documentaries, I was trying to do long takes, complicated camera angles, fine lighting. I wanted to be very simple in this film, very communicative."

Why do you make films? I asked him.

"I've been doing it for 20 years," he answered. "I made a lot of films, documentaries, in Yugoslavia. I've made films for different reasons in different periods. In the beginning I started doing film work because I liked it; I was very young and I thought it would be nice to be a film director. Then later I wanted to be an artist and make important, interesting art. And, let's say, now in the present phase, for perhaps the last 10 years, I've been trying to find some kind of mixture of direct political engagement and a corresponding aesthetics. Some kind of mixture of engagement and a new language in film. I'm looking for new ways of expression."

Tired Companions is proof that even under the most desperate conditions, in regions where political confusion--and worse--dominates, there are those who have the intellectual and moral strength to speak truthfully. It is a film that fills one with hope.

See also:
Thoughts about the 1997 Toronto film festival
Film, social reality and authenticity
[6 October 1997]