Goran Dević’s What’s To Be Done (screening in Sarajevo’s Documentary Competition) opens on a bleak note. The deputy head of the trade union at Gredelj Railway Wagon Factory in Zagreb has just committed suicide. Government forces are threatening to close the place down. There are employees here who’ve given their entire lives to the place – 30 or 40 years – but now bankruptcy proceedings are threatened. They are faced with being locked out of their workplace – and symbolically thrown onto the scrapheap of history.
This is the backcloth for a project which has unlikely roots. Twelve years ago, Dević and a Montenegrin writer friend began working on a screenplay (“pure fiction”) about an industrial dispute in the Balkans. But he wasn’t sure he yet had the first-hand knowledge to pull the assignment off. After hearing about protests at the railway factory, he called the union leaders, introduced himself and offered them his services. “I said can I be with you? I have a small car. I can drive you. I can fight with you if necessary.” They agreed to let him join them. “They opened themselves to me from the first moment they saw me,” Dević remembers. “After that, I stayed with them.”
The director turned up at first with just a small hand-held camera and started filming – but at this stage, he thought he was simply doing research for the fiction script. He didn’t have a sound man. He believes now that one reason the footage is so fresh is that he never expected to use it. He was relaxed and unperturbed about being caught up in the middle of a bitter strike. “I didn’t have any fear about making a wrong decision.”
Only gradually did he realise that his material could form the basis for a documentary.
This is a hybrid film with some dramatics elements, perhaps most notable the scene at the end in which workers are shown in an empty factory, miming work they used to do for real as religious Arvo Pärt music plays on the soundtrack.
At the centre of the film is the union leader, Željko, a belligerent and passionate man.
“It’s always difficult because on one hand you are a friend of the protagonist; you are a supporter…on the other hand, privately I am leftist and guys from the union are right-oriented. For me, that is the wrong position for a union fight – but it’s also good for a film because it is complex. All over Europe, not only in the former Yugoslavia, the left don’t speak about the right to work. The left fight their own small identity fights and they don’t fight for workers anymore.”
Early on, it wasn’t inevitable that parts of the railway wagon facility would have to be shut. “I didn’t expect that a factory like that would close down so quickly,” the director notes. He had heard rumours that the Government was contemplating closing down certain factories as part of an agreement struck with the European Union but he didn’t believe these were true. After all, this was a state-owned company more than 100 years old, “a big company with a strong tradition.”
However, it turned out the Gredelj factory was caught up in forces beyond the workers’ control. After the end of communism, most had voted for privatisation – but they didn’t realise that their own jobs would eventually become redundant. Dević talks about filming a world “which was disappearing literally in front of my eyes.”
Željko has seen most of the film – and has given it this blessing. He was due in Sarajevo for the world premiere earlier this week.
Dević acknowledges he is an admirer of workers’ tales from the 70s and 80s like Man Of Iron and Man Of Marble, directed by Andrzej Wajda, and of some of the documentaries made by Wajda’s fellow Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski during the Solidarity period in Poland. He also regards the film as a natural companion piece to some of his own earlier films like The Building (2018) and The Steel Mill Café (2017). He describes them as “almost the same film” and as the documentary equivalent of “brothers.”
What’s To Be Done? was produced by Hrvoje Osvadić and made through Petnaesta umjetnost (the company Dević founded), with support from the Croatian Audiovisual Centre. Producer Osvadić is Dević’s loyal partner in the production company. “He has been my support for 10 years. No production company would support me for so long without money – it is impossible!” A sales agent is yet to be appointed.
Dević would like the documentary spark a debate about how and why workers from the communist era who have been left behind by the brave new capitalist era. “I hope the film will be important in the region…I think the story is universal.”
He is already well underway on a new project, Pavilion 6, which he presented in Cinelink’s Rough Cut Boutique August 14. This is inspired by his mother-in-law’s experiences during the pandemic, when she was preparing for her first Covid vaccine – and making lots of friends with people in the same predicament. “It’s a funny film, very funny, and serious. It is also politically interesting for me…there are some very strange layers which I didn’t realise before the shooting,” he reflects on the new project.
The prolific director is also returning to fiction with another new project, Flood, which he is now in the midst of writing. This is about a Croatian concentration camp during the Second World War.Meanwhile, he continues to teach at university. He is an associate professor – and his job helps pays the bills. “When I work on a film, I work for nothing. I work as a volunteer,” he says.
