The news that Nebojša Slijepčević won the Palme d'Or for a short film at the Cannes Film Festival came so unexpectedly and thundered through the entire media space of the region as quickly as the entire public found out. And then, after the initial combination of shock, elation and almost no information about the subject and the author's previous work, the same public found itself faced with the big question of how to treat this award, the man who deserved it and the very topic for which he was awarded.
While the shocked public is thinking about the latter, it is worth noting here that the only real reason why Slijepčević will not suffer the fate of Želimir Žilnik, whose "Early Works" first won the Golden Bear in Berlin, only to be banned in Yugoslavia, and their author was forced to build a career in Germany, in that we still formally live in a democracy, so such a thing is unthinkable today.
But that's why everything else from the perspective of the way in which it is conceivable to actively obstruct the author and his undesirable work, is certainly very well known and, after all, it has already been used against Nebojsa Slijepčević.
For this reason, those with a shorter memory should be reminded of the action from 2019, called "Meni se to gleda", which Croatian filmmakers led with the aim of putting pressure on HRT, which simply did not want to show a whole series of excellent and award-winning Croatian documentaries, which even HRT was a co-producer thanks to older contracts, and all under nebulous excuses about the lack of public interest or the inadequate minutes of the films. Although it was clear to everyone that it was about undesirable content.
In the end, the pressure did bear fruit, but it remained that one of the biggest hot potatoes was Slijepčević's film "Srbenka", which dealt with the process of creation of the Rijeka play by author Oliver Frljić, about the fate of Aleksandra Zec and Aleksandra's fate in general. So we had the fact that Slijepčević received the "Vladimir Nazor" award for a film that could not possibly reach a wider audience.
Well, now, the subject of the Cannes award-winning film, "The Man Who Couldn't Be Silent", is not so distasteful to the wider Croatian public and official politics, as was the fate of Aleksandra Zec, as Zoran Milanović's recent statements on the subject can testify to. But if the same public and politics do not know what to do with Tom Buzova and his rank and his place in official historiography and memory, they really do not know.
Because Tomo Buzov was everything that official Croatian politics wanted to erase. A Croat, a retired JNA officer, who married in Serbia and remained living in Belgrade, who clearly did not feel the call of the nation in the early nineties, but who, at the same time, with his heroic act of self-sacrifice, which from the perspective of concrete help to the Bosniak victims from that infamous train, was in vain , showed that resistance to the nationalist evil that led the wars in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina was also possible from completely different ideological positions.
The wider Croatian public therefore does not know anything about Tomi Buzov even to this day, and the memorial plaque in his honor and the pontoon in the Kastelan marina, in the city where he was born, which has been named after him since 2015, is practically exclusively the result of the owner's private initiative marina, Joško Berketa and people from the "Mirno more" association, and by no means any official politics of memory.
As for Serbia's relationship with Tomi Buzov, in New Belgrade, in the neighborhood where he lived, a plaque was erected in his honor, by the decision of the current Acting Mayor of Belgrade, Aleksandar Šapić, who then led the New Belgrade Municipality. But that happened again after a private initiative, so last year someone removed the plaque, only to have it put up again through citizen action.
Because, let's not lie, not even Serbia knows what to do with Tom Buzova and his role in history and collective memory. Again because of his origin, but also because of his heroic act, but also because facing his own role in the nineties is completely meaningless in a situation where the ideas of that policy have never been more alive in the public and in the ruling politics.
So it turns out that Boris Dežulović did more for the memory of Tom Buzov, who inspired many, including Slijepčević himself, with his text about his fate, than anyone else.
Tomo Buzov was kidnapped and killed as a man who could not remain silent, in one of the darkest war episodes, when on February 27, 1993, the war criminal Milan Lukić and his soldiers stopped train 671 on the Belgrade-Bar line, at the Štrpci station, i.e. at part of the railway that entered Bosnia and Herzegovina, with the intention of removing from the train and killing people with Bosniak names and surnames, all of whom were citizens of Serbia. That's what they did in the end, but along with eighteen of them, including a minor, sixteen-year-old Senad Đečević, they also killed Toma Buzov and another man whose name is not known, and it was probably one of the exchange students under Unaligned.
To date, the bodies of only four murdered people have been found, the perpetrators were convicted after several years of trials, at the court in Bijelo Polje, to mostly mild sentences and the entire case was covered by programmed oblivion. Of course, if we do not count on non-governmental organizations, victims' families and individual investigative journalists. Because even among the Bosniak public in Bosnia and Herzegovina, which unfortunately has to live with a whole series of even worse crimes against Bosniaks, including the issue of denying the genocide in Srebrenica, the story of the hijacking of this train is just one in a series of similar ones. And thus the fate of Toma Buzov, a man who does not have a team behind him that will remember him.
Just as the collective did not stand behind him, even when he decided to sacrifice himself.
Nebojša Slijepčević's film, especially after the award in Cannes, therefore becomes a wonderful diversion in the local politics of memory and reminds that art can do a lot, especially when it is done from a basic human belief.
Bonus video:
