30.03.2018.
Retrospective of 70 years of Zastava Film at the Documentary and Short Film Festival
Old acquaintances together again - this is how tonight's performance of the Zastava Film Military Film Center at the Dom omladine Beograd could be presented in brief at the March Festival devoted to the documentary and short feature film. Because, as the organizers of the festival said welcoming visitors, Zastava Film is one of those production houses that have built and maintained this festival all these years, which makes it a real national film house. It was therefore natural for this production house to start marking the 70th anniversary of its existence and work at this festival, with a retrospective of films of different types, but each and every of them being of the highest value.
“With 2500 films and over 150 domestic and international recognitions, Zastava film has reached the highest levels in Serbian and Yugoslav film production and has become an authentic witness and chronicler of military history in this region”, the Director of this house, Lieutenant Colonel Goran Ikonić said. “There is almost no better known name from the film world from these parts that did not go through Zastava, working or cooperating with it. All of them made an immense contribution to the development of this house and received unique experience from it. The reputation of this institution was also foged by its employees, who created it with their inexhaustible energy and hardened it when it was easy but also when it was difficult. And it was difficult at times when they defended our people and the land, and when the people of the Military Film Centre were in trenches with our warriors, recording heroic resistance in warfare and defending the aggressor.”
From this huge treasury, the audience could see several films that were awarded exactly at this festival.
Series of films from “Tears on the Face” by Stjepan Zaninović, whose cause was a gathering of Nazis in Germany in the 1960s and the message was how easy it is to destroy costly peace, to “Train” from 2002, which speaks without a word about the night of 23/24 March 1999, rounded out a circle of seven decades. And in that circle, there were “Silence”, a short film nominated once for the Oscar on the Nazi punitive expedition in Serbia in 1941 and the difference between man and non-human. There is also the “Death of a villager Djurica”, who made his only choice before the punitive expedition - how he would die. Quite exciting film, just as an action film, “On the Gams' Trails”, showed how the JNA mountain units were trained. If a very short Milivoje Nestorović's “Nest” is a story about the heavy raising of the offspring, the animated film “Pontius Pilate” by Nikola Majdak talks about the eternal responsibility for the destruction of lives, but also how unsuccessful is the attempt of washing away. Because some bloody footprints are always there ... “Šantić 1993” by Stjepan Zaninović spoke in the finest way about the horror of war, divided cities like Mostar that year, and brothers who forgot that they do not have any other sky besides this.
