Business Doc Europe caught up with Tamara Babun, producer at Zagreb-based outfit Wolfgang&Dolly LLC. Babun is producing one of the documentary projects being presented in the Balkan Stars section of this year’s AJB DOC Industry, unspooling in Sarajevo until September 11.
Titled Another Film About the War, Father and Home, the project is Damir Markovina’s debut feature doc. Babun bills it as a film in which “the author is tackling his relationship with his father, the experience of being a refugee, the mythology surrounding the separation of Yugoslavia, the consequences of the Dayton Agreement on life in Bosnia and the impact historical events can have on a family.”
Born in Belgrade in 1973, director Markovina grew up in Mostar and studied Acting at the Academy of Dramatic Art in Zagreb. He then went on to work as an actor, writer and director for film, TV and theatre. In his previous doc premiered at Zagreb Dox in 2021, a medium-length film titled Wait for Me, the helmer had already tackled similar themes and delved into the inner conflicts of his family.
In detail, the new picture zooms in on “the impeccable public persona” which the director’s father, Roko Markovina, created, “and the price his family members are still paying as a result of his decisions.”
In his director’s statement, Markovina highlights how post-Yugoslav audiences kept on enjoying good stories rather than accurate facts, ending up romanticising war chronicles and turning defeats into moral victories. It’s therefore clear how a documentary touching upon so many painful, controversial historical events may have a hard time in gaining significance and impact over well-crafted pieces of fiction.
Markovina finds how his father has been “held captive” by certain political narratives for thirty years, and his commitment to the cause of a united Bosnia and Herzegovina throughout the war, “made him one of the only six voters against the unjust Dayton Agreement,” and “a pariah” for the ruling nationalist structures established in the country.
Throughout the film, the man is seen “as a parliamentary delegate engaged in rhetorical clashes with today’s convicted war criminals,” whose “warmongering from the parliament’s podium resulted in Bosnia and Herzegovina’s entry into the war only months later.”
The family home, a high-rise socialist flat, is featured in the photographic and Super 8 archives created by his father. It is also set to be “one of the film’s possible emotional punctuations.”
The father’s bold choices forced the family to accept his “sacrifice” and go through “a self-imposed exile, constantly mourning the pre-war Mostar and indulging in its apotheosis.”
In his statement, Markovina explains how he accompanies his father to “a tour of the focal points of his own past, contrasting his perceptions of these sites and events with their current condition.”
To date, Markovina’s father is a farmer who is committed to cultivating the land, salvages old boats and writes his memoirs. We also realise that he has abandoned his passions for painting and filmmaking following the outbreak of the war.
The director’s need to work on this film is visceral and prompted by very personal reasons, even though it deals with themes that may resonate within the Balkan region and beyond: “It’s my last chance to save my father from the 30-year-long loop of ex-Yugoslav post-war misery and, at the very least, to finally get on the same page with him before he dies. I’m hoping for an optimistic ending to this Balkan tale about surviving a war and a universal problematic father-son relationship,” he says.
Talking about the challenges they had to face along the way, Babun makes no mystery that, just like any film she has been working on, “closing the budget, especially that of a creative documentary” has been the hardest task to complete. She adds that another problem they had to solve was “clearing archive rights and music rights.”
In fact, most of the preparatory research work was carried out by the director himself in regional TV archives from the 1980s and 1990s as well as from his own family archive.
When asked whether the team is planning to run an associated impact campaign, Babun says that this is not in their plans even though she doesn’t completely rule out the idea.
Speaking of the major outlets for the project, she says: “We will start with festivals, have a targeted theatrical release and then negotiate with broadcasters, but online platforms might be the best home for this film after its festival run has been completed.”
Another Film About the War, Father and Home is currently in production. The expected delivery date is set for October 2024. The total budget is €127,046.67, and the project needs €56,856.21 more to be brought to completion.
