When I first met the Montenegrin documentary filmmaker Gojko Kastratović some fifteen years ago, I was working on a production for a documentary in Montenegro. He had arranged a meeting with another producer, but the purpose of the meeting was soon set aside. Kastratović became visibly moved when he noticed a similarity between his name and that of a boy I mentioned, who was one of the subjects of my film. The boy, Labinot Kastrati, was a child refugee and a victim of a war crime. He was shot in the head by reservists of the Yugoslav Army four kilometers from our house in the Montenegrin town of Rožaje during the Kosovo war, as he was sheltering with his mother and sisters, who witnessed his death. What struck Kastratović deeply was that, despite being Albanian, the boy's last name bore a remarkable resemblance to his own.
Gojko was interested in the boy’s destiny; he wanted to know more and see his picture. I noticed in him something that I hadn’t encountered in my generation, or even in the generation of my parents—a sort of unquestioning empathy, and above all, disgust towards the perpetrators of the crime. His reaction transcended mere decency. It was something much deeper.
The conversation marked the beginning of an acquaintance that lasted until his death in 2018. This friendship was also maintained by my parents, who were closer in age to his 70 years, whereas I was in my mid-twenties and living abroad. Later, I discovered something that confirmed to me the reason for his intuitive and natural aversion towards war atrocities, which was not the normal kind that most people feel but a more thorough rejection of the cause of the atrocity, which is ethnically conditioned dehumanization.
What triggered his empathy and identification with the child victim, as well as his proactive opposition towards the ideology that took the boy's life, was his stark anti-fascism. As a filmmaker, this became even more apparent to me after I learned about Kastratović’s connection to one of the greatest Yugoslav films and among the greatest anti-fascist epic war films ever made, “The Battle on Neretva” (1968), which he worked on as an assistant director alongside the famous Montenegrin director Veljko Bulajić, who recently passed away.
Through Gojko, I learned firsthand about all the difficulties and excitement emanating from the process of making one of the largest non-Hollywood productions in history. As a war epic, its spectacular realism was rarely topped in its time. He told me about the aerial footage he himself was in charge of, as well as the complexities of mounting an international production of such caliber, with a cast hailing from Germany, America, Russia, Italy, and Yugoslavia, all working together in this Yugoslav, German-Italian-American co-production. His explanations were very thorough, given his background as a film historian.
International productions of that size are a thing of the past, a historic anomaly that would never occur again. Hollywood actors coming to play communist heroes is even more unlikely. Just as we won’t have another Pablo Picasso to design a poster for a film like this, we won’t have films like this anymore, or people of such spirit.
Bulajić, born in a village near Nikšić (Montenegro), fought in WWII, studied in Italy, and lived and worked in Sarajevo and Zagreb. He was already a Golden Lion winner by the time he started working on his big war epics. The first one was "Kozara," which covered the eponymous battle and is reminiscent of Italian neo-realism, with one addition: incredibly realistic war scenes. Basically, at some moments, it feels like De Sica meeting John Ford. For Andrei Nikolaidis, it is a genre of Yugoslav western without imperialism.
His major achievement came, however, with "The Battle of Neretva" in 1969. Speaking of John Ford, he was a fan of the film and personally said so to Bulajić after the Oscars ceremony, where the film was nominated in the Best Foreign Language Film category.
In 1943, the Partisan guerrilla in Yugoslavia was pushed from most of the rest of the territories. Serbia was under German control, with nationalists serving as puppets of the Germans. Montenegro was similarly under Italian occupation, shared in part with Serb nationalists as well. Croatia declared an Ustasha fascist state of NDH and went full Nazi, taking parts of Bosnia as well. The only safe haven was in the Bosnian region of Herzegovina, bordering Montenegro and Croatia, as well as central Bosnia and Krajina, where support for the resistance was so strong that many of those territories were practically liberated and hosted the leadership of the resistance, including Josip Broz Tito himself. This prompted the Germans to launch a large operation to dismantle it.
The Partisans were burdened by hundreds of wounded soldiers, as well as thousands of refugees who were escaping collective punishment by the Germans. They were attempting to move them to safe territory deeper inside the country. Meanwhile, the Germans joined forces with the Italians, the Ustashas, and the Chetniks. The Chetniks were originally a Yugoslav royalist guerrilla group that had become undermined by their ethno-nationalist fanaticism. They shifted their priorities, deciding to cleanse Yugoslavia of non-Serbs instead of fighting the occupation, and switched from resistance to collaborators of the Nazis, specializing in atrocities against civilians.
It was an enormous film. The clashes depicted included aviation, artillery, tanks, and even horses. Much has also been said about the international cast of the film. Orson Welles plays a Chetnik senator. This was no coincidence, as Welles lived for a while in Yugoslavia in the sixties, where he made his adaptation of Kafka’s "The Trial." Yul Brynner was a big star at the time. Born in Vladivostok, his background explains his readiness to join such an international production. He brings his usual Western hero-like coolness and grittiness to his role. Franco Nero, part of the package that came with the Italian co-producer, plays a dissenting Italian soldier. Curd Jürgens and especially Hardy Krüger, representing the German co-production, are realistic, non-caricatured German military officials, who play a game of cat and mouse with the Partisans. Soviet actor and director Sergei Bondarchuk, famed for "War and Peace" and "Waterloo," also has an important role, playing a Partisan commander. US genre film actor Anthony Dawson plays a stoic Italian general.
But the heart of the film are the Yugoslav actors, who play the leading roles, some of them legends of Yugoslav cinema. The screenplay by Bulajić emphasize these roles, their background in a very elegant way. Their relations are the least Hollywood as it gets, with siblings and friendship relations in foreground, rather than romance and love interests. Ljubiša Samardžić and Sylva Koscina play Montenegrin brother and sister fighting in the resistance. Milena Dravić, who got internationally noticed in early films by Dušan Makavejev, plays a nurse who is taking care of the typhus patients. Pavle Vujisić, who Welles considered the greatest actor of his time, plays a truck driver who evacuates the wounded. There are many others as well, such as Boris Dvornik, Bata Živojinović and so on.
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Bulajić’s film resists portraying any of these warring sides in a superficial or caricatured way. Despite being made under a communist dictatorship, the film avoids triumphalism or moral, cultural, and ideological pathos often seen in Soviet war films. To paraphrase Francis Ford Coppola, who distinguished between war films (such as his own “Apocalypse Now”) and anti-war films (like Kon Ichikawa’s “The Burmese Harp”), this one is an anti-war film. Despite the spectacular and gritty depictions of warfare, peace, not freedom or victory, is always hovering above it. In the world depicted by Bulajić, even death is a form of peace, making his film convey a radically solemn idea of peace. It has a resounding anti-fascism connected to peace, not to triumphalism or propaganda. The film therefore emphasizes common-sense humanity, mourning the loss of human life, and the enlightenment idea of the value of human life itself. It rejects ethno-nationalism by assembling humanity into a collective effort to defend human dignity and peace. And that was precisely what I sensed in Gojko Kastratović all those years ago.