Roko Markovina was a passionate advocate of unity, whether in Yugoslavia under Tito, or Bosnia and Herzegovina after the dissolution of Yugoslavia after Tito’s death. What he wasn’t was a nationalist. As an MP within the Social Democratic Party of Bosnia and Herzegovina from 1990 to 1996, he recognised that Bosnia was made up of groupings with distinct nationalist ambitions, all vying for control within the country’s borders; the Serbs, the Croats and the Bosniaks.
Roko’s son Damir Markovina, director of We Shall Live Together which world-premieres August 16 in Sarajevo Documentary Competition, tells BDE that his father recognised Bosnia and Herzegovina “as a country that consists (constitutionally also) of many nations, [but] he didn’t want to be part of any politics that had, as its goal, supremacy of one nation over others… He didn’t want to be part of a nationalist movement.”
The history of the Bosnia in the early 1990s is one of savagery and, according to Markovina, devastating mismanagement, as practised by politicians on all sides, his father included.
“This film, for me, was always the repercussions of the choice of the moral man,” the director continues to BDE. “If you don’t deal with a problem, your children will have to deal with it, in one way or another. And that is something I have dwelled on for the better part of my filmmaking life,” he says. “The choices that my father made completely altered the lives of my brother and me.”
“In the dramaturgy of this film, this conflict between the generation that didn’t have a say and the generation that chose something for us was very important,” Damir adds. “I simply believe that every generation owes the next an answer to the question of why the world they left behind is the way it is, and whether—at some point or place—they could, or should have acted differently.”
Producer Tamara Babun Zovko (Wolfgang & Dolly LLC) concurs. “This film approaches that history through an intimate lens: a story of shattered ideals, a dispersed family, a lost homeland, and the solitude that can accompany unwavering belief. At its core lies a dilemma. There is pride in the principles that guided this family, but also the recognition of the wounds those same principles have left behind,” she says.
One of Roko Markovina’s most contentious political decisions was to oppose the signing of the Dayton Agreement of December 1995, which proposed the splitting of the country into two parts: the largely Serb-populated Republika Srpska and the mainly Croat-Bosniak-populated Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The agreement helped to establish peace in the country, if not the former Yugoslavia as a whole, where war continued to rage until 1999.
Roko’s apartment was confiscated after he refused to serve as a minister in the newly formed Croatian government in Mostar. For him, Mostar was a city of love before 1992 and a city of hate afterwards, and so he eventually chose exile, leaving for an island off the coast of Croatia, together with his reluctant wife and his young son Dragan, who is now a historian. Meanwhile, Damir chose his own exile, and settled in Zagreb where he began to learn the business and craft of acting, and then direction.
For everybody, the subsequent thirty years have been painful. “You have this very prolonged situation of post-war trauma and stress, where my father is not happy with the development of the society or creation of Bosnia in any way,” says Damir. “Basically, every time I would come home over the past 30 years and enter into the living room, I would enter straight into the living room of 1992, with the same talk, with the same problems that bothered him then, and by extension, bothered my entire family, my mother especially.”
While Damir acknowledges and respects the ethical stance that his father took, the toll on his family was considerable. “This thing that he did, which is very admirable, in a certain way, cost me the better part of my childhood, the conditions of my life, the apartment, my home, my friends, everything,” says Damir.
“I don’t want to point the finger at my father, no, because I love him,” Damir adds. “He’s a man I owe very much too, but it’s a generational thing. On his watch, the entire world that we knew collapsed here in Yugoslavia…He’s a front row witness of the dissolution of one country, and the creation of another, and he was in a parliament where that actually happened at the time. And I wondered, I wanted to know, how did it [the subsequent chaos] all happen?”
While Damir allows Roko to reflect on the past in quiet one-on-one moments, the gloves are off around the lunch table when Damir’s firebrand brother Dragan joins the fray. Dragan takes his father to task for his seeming willingness to attack the Serb stronghold of Banja Luka in late 1995, which may have ended with a massacre, had the Dayton Agreement not been signed a few weeks later. It would have been “divine justice,” Roko reasons of the cancelled military campaign, to which Dragan responds: “you can’t answer crime with crime, and call it justice.”
Later, Dragan challenges his father on his decision to remain away from Mostar, even after thirty years of peace: “Isn’t love between two people more important than ideals? Make your wife happy for once. Go and live in Mostar. That would be your first unselfish act.”
Damir takes audacious creative decisions in telling the story of his family, such as the superimposition of Super-8 archive on to the faces and eyes of still photographs of all the protagonists, especially Roko, and on the walls of their former home, to indicate “the inner world of memories that he lives in.”
“I knew from the beginning that it is going to be an antagonistic relationship between my brother and me, and him, in the film,” explains Damir. “We should call him out to explain his political position then, and now. That’s why I knew I was going to use our family 8-millimetre archive that he shot.”
Roko won’t be able to attend the world-premiere of the film in Sarajevo, due to illness, but he gives the work his blessing, despite the critical stance it takes.
“Yes, he has a problem with my stand…but it’s always a minefield working on a thing like this, especially in a family. I had to balance always between the part of the son and the director of the film,” says Damir. “I told my father from the beginning, you will try to tell one story. But I’m telling my story with you in it. You’re the principal part, but it’s my story.”
“In the end, my father said he was really, really happy because, after all, it touches the questions that are really important to him,” Damir signs off. “I think in the end, in a way it is also for him a legacy project. In that way, he’s satisfied. At least he told me so. Or maybe he’s just supporting his prodigal son…”
Additional questions were posed by Dimitra Kouzi.
