The second part in a trilogy that began with 2008’s Will You Ever Be Happy Again? Comrades, I Am Not Ashamed of My Communist Past, created in 2016 and temporaily shelved for the pandemic, takes its title from a line from a movie, one of 58 that feature in the production.
Performed in its entirety in Serbo-Croatian, the official language of the former-Yugoslavia, the comrades in question are live actors Sanja Mitrović, who also wrote and directed the piece and Vladimir Aleksić, her childhood friend who grew up on the same street as her in the city of Zrenjanin in what is now Serbia. The aim, says Mitrović, was to reflect upon a country which shattered violently into separate states in 1992.
Comrades draws on the personal memories and the collective values that have since been lost in the transition between the communism of charismatic Yugoslavian leader Josep Broz Tito and the neoliberal privatisation that followed the war, says the director. The focal point is the vibrant cinema industry that thrived from the 1940s to the late 1980s, led by Serbian giant Avala Films, which rivalled Hollywood in its output and stars; producing some 400 feature films a year and 200 documentaries. “They were coproductions of various countries in Yugoslavia: Croatia, Macedonia, Serbia, Slovenia… they attracted huge stars to perform in them, including from abroad, and in Comrades these films behave as a third player in that we interact with them,” says Mitrović.
“My work is too personal to be really called documentary,” she says, “I'm interested in questioning received narratives; official history is always written by somebody. I try to zoom in to the real experience and wanted to show that beauty and solidarity existed at the time”. Mitrović has since emigrated to Belgium, while Aleksić, whose voice is somewhat quieter in the piece, returned to Serbia from Italy, tired of being typecast as a “Russian bad guy”.
However, Comrades raises so many questions that it is hard to know where to start. While familiar to a Balkan audience, these movies are a mystery to most of us here, today and presented in clips it is difficult to make meaning of them on mass. If things were good, how did it all fall apart? Is there really such a leap between communism and neoliberalism? What happened to the relationship (remarkable in itself) between communist Yugoslavia and the rest of the world? Mitrović says she created the piece in response to always being asked where she was from and being only able to name a country that no longer existed. “I grew up in Yugoslavia, not ‘Serbia’” she says. But did Yugoslavia ever exist? Does it exist in these movies?
Finally, just years ago Avala Films was put up for public auction and the whole bankrupt enterprise was bought by a taxi driver, says Mitrović incredulously: “the building, the costumes, everything in the films, but also all the films themselves; it’s an expensive process to store them you need to put them underground to keep them under certain conditions... We don't know who is really behind this so-called taxi driver's purchase. It’s just another example of how privatisation has shattered our collective solidarity.”
The closing piece in the trilogy, that explores the after-effects of the war, is set for 2023.
