Sarajevo: ‘Lost Country’ director Vladimir Perisic on the return of European fascism

For Lost land, director Vladimir Perišić delved deep into a very personal history. The film, which premiered during Critics’ Week in Cannes and will screen at the Sarajevo Film Festival on Saturday, August 12, follows a young Serbian teenager in Belgrade who becomes entangled in the massive student protests against the authoritarian regime of the Serbian president. Slobodan Milosevic.

The protests, which began in Belgrade in 1996 and spread across the country, were in response to electoral fraud: In the 1996 local elections, Milošević’s Socialist Party of Serbia had lost several key cities, but like Donald Trump refused to accept the results.

“The protests lasted more than three months, which I checked, making them the longest student protest in the history of Europe, and there was a real carnival atmosphere,” recalls Perišić, who was 19 at the time and was swept up in the spirit of civil disobedience. “It was not so much about a political discourse or any kind of ideology, but about it, carnival-like, about reversing the balance of power in society. For me, and for many people at the time, it brought about a kind of inner revolution.”

In the film, the protests have a similar impact on 15-year-old Stefan, played by newcomer Jovan Ginic, who finds himself caught between the street and school unrest amid his anti-Milošević classmates and his loyalty to his family. loyal supporters of Milošević. Stefan’s own mother, Marklena, is the spokeswoman for the regime. She goes on television every night to spread the government’s lies. Stefan overhears her talking on the phone and plans a police action to violently suppress the demonstrations.

“My mother was also part of the Milošević government, although she was in the culture department, so not a spokeswoman,” says Perišić, “but I had the same experience as Stefan as a child, growing up in a political family(s) experience this conflict of dual loyalty, between the loyalty you have to your parents and a loyalty to some kind of inner moral obligation. All the politics of Serbian nationalism is based on family loyalty, this idea of ​​blood relationship to a group. It is actually the basis of all right wing politics I was interested in undermining that.

To find his Stefan, Perišić searched the country. “We met almost 2,000 children, but I couldn’t find one. I became desperate,” he recalls. In the original script, Stefan, like Perišić, played water polo, and the director decided to explore some water polo clubs in Belgrade.

“We came to a club, Red Star, and the coach called all the kids who came to the edge of the pool, and it was really beautiful, they looked like little fish,” says Perišić. “So I took out my phone to take a picture. All the children watched the trainer except one. He looked straight at me. I said to my assistants, “Let’s call that boy.” It was Jovan.”

Perišić spent nine months rehearsing with the new actor for the first day of shooting. “It wasn’t really a rehearsal. I didn’t let him read the script. I just asked him questions like “what do you do when you have a fight with your mother?” and film it,” he says. “When we came to film, I filmed in sequence, chronologically, and treated the material as if I was making a documentary. If the actors did something different from the script that made things go in a different direction, I’d change the script. That’s why I like working with non-actors, it makes you humble. You discover the story together with them.”

The documentary approach extended to the locations and set design. Can’t afford period costumes or sets – “I didn’t have the budget to do a Visconti style historical epic, and anyway, I’m not much into those movies, they have a museum/antiquity feel” – Perišić instead found Belgrade streets and apartments unchanged since the late 90s.

“That’s why I shot so much in the backyard,” he says. “The neighborhood I shot in has changed a lot, but only from the front. If you go to the backyards, it looks exactly the same. You would think you were back in 1996.”

For Marklena, the political spokeswoman, Perišić opted for the opposite of a first-timer, casting Jasna Durićić, the Serbian star best known for her role as a Bosnian translator trying to save her family from the pre-Srebrenica massacre. an Oscar nominated drama from Jasmila Zbanic. Quo Vadis, Aida?

“My idea with Jasna was that her character as a politician was acting all the time,” says Perišić. “So even when this mom comes home and is with her son and her family, she’s still performing. But the documentary approach was the same. There is a scene where Stefan asks his mother if the government stole the election. She says no. She lies. And then she gets on her knees before him. I never wrote that. It came straight from Jasna. She’s a genius. When I filmed it, it felt like a documentary, like I was capturing a real moment.”

But look Lost land in 2023 can be a disturbing experience. With far-right nationalism on the rise across Europe, the film feels less like a record of the past and closer to last week’s news story.

“The story clearly has echoes of what is happening now, with these threats to democracy that we see everywhere, not just with Trump in the United States or with (Jair) Bolsonaro in Brazil, but with the rise of the right across Europe. ”, says Perišić. “In the 1990s, we really saw the return of historical fascism in ex-Yugoslavia. I left Belgrade for France, and what I loved about France at the time was that there was a real red line with the far right. In public discourse, among mainstream political parties and in the media on TV, the far right, fascism, was simply not acceptable. Little by little that has changed and these ideas are becoming mainstream again. So my film is also a warning. These ideas are not dead and can come back – quickly and relentlessly.”