Dana Budisavljević for "Vijesti": We have lost our balance and only talk about the crimes of others, while hiding our own

"A silent scream against fascism"..."A glimmer of hope that there is a different, better, more aware, more sensitive and responsible Croatia", this is how the Croatian media and intellectuals described the film "Diary of Diana Budisavljević", which narrates probably one of the greatest stories of the Second World War about which we learned the most precisely thanks to the achievement of the director Dana Budisavljević.

Tonight, at the Montenegrin National Theater, the film will open the tenth Montenegrin human rights film festival Ubrzaj, organized by the Center for Civic Education.

On this occasion, Dana Budisavljević speaks for "Vijesti" about the unjustly forgotten surnamed Diana and the rediscovery of this extraordinary personality, working on a film at the time of great historical revisionism, dealing with the past, activism...

Dana and Diana Budisavljević - coincidence or not? What is your relationship with the woman of the same name, about whom you made a film? How did you discover her and get her diary?

I am not related to Diana by blood, she is Austrian, born in Obexer, and came to Zagreb in 1919. Having married the doctor Julija Budisavljević, whom she met in Innsbruck. I am distantly related to Julio, but I have never heard that story in my family - and later it turned out that my grandmother knew both Diana and Julio.

I only heard about Diana in 2010 when I read the book "Dnevnik Diana Budisavljević 1941-1945." Of course, the similarity in the name helped me a lot in my work on the film because that coincidence was intriguing to everyone, it gave the feeling that it had to be like that.

How did you feel when you read Diana's diary and what did it give you insight into? What interested you the most and prompted the idea to make a film, how long did the preparation and research take?

The diary was a fascinating read for me, it gave me an insight into the events during the NDH, from the first person of a fifty-year-old woman who launched her private humanitarian campaign to help Serbian women and children imprisoned in camps. Diana's husband was of Serbian origin, but he was also a very respectable doctor, and since Diana is Austrian, they did not have much reason to fear in the beginning, theoretically they could have lived through those four war years peacefully. Nevertheless, Diana steps out of her comfort zone and cannot turn a blind eye to the news about the camps near Zagreb. He wonders what he can do to ease the suffering, to send help. At first, Diana thinks that it will only be a monetary donation, but things will turn out differently.

Since there has been a constant debate about Jasenovac in Croatia for a long time and an attempt to deny that it became a death camp for Serbs, Jews and Roma during the NDH, and that we are all tired of these fights, Diana's story very clearly put things in perspective. place, only through the sequence of events and without ideological support. Her diary is on the one hand cold, it is a sequence of events, full of data; on the other hand, it's fascinating just like that, because you don't get the feeling that it was written in a tendentious manner, nor to satisfy anyone's ideological needs. She is not invested in anyone, she writes as it was. Such historical sources from the NDH are very rare.

I know of only one other book, "Konclogor na Sava" by Ilija Jakovljević, and that is more or less all that can be read about the NDH from one's personal perspective. Although we learned about the NDH as fascists and criminals, which they were, the NDH was still a taboo subject in Yugoslavia. I don't know the exact answer why, but I assume that it was due to the desire to build brotherhood and unity, on which Yugoslavia rested, as well as the victory over the Nazis and fascists, that is, over the external enemy. The internal enmity has been pushed under the carpet, probably waiting for some time in which this topic will be able to be opened, only we did not welcome it, that is - we welcomed a new war.

As someone who made documentaries, you shot a relatively small, black-and-white film, without mass scenes, even though it is a big historical story, a depiction of a big tragedy... Why did you choose this approach?

You could hardly call this film small. For our, regional terms, it is a huge undertaking. In European terms, it is still a low budget film, meaning a film with a below-average budget, but almost ten years of work on the film, extensive research, historical reconstructions, thoughtful visual language, top regional actors... the production value is very high. In the beginning, my producer Miljenka Čogelja and I thought that "Diana" would be a documentary film, that's right, but quite early on we started to realize that since Diana is no longer there (she died in 1978, and all her collaborators were also already deceased) that we will have to go towards a feature-documentary combination. On the other hand, I never thought that it should be entirely a feature film because it was the last hour to record the stories of the witnesses who went through those camps as children. They are all around 80 years old today.

What was the meeting with "Diana's children", the surviving camp inmates whose testimonies you recorded, like? What was that experience like?

They were wonderful, you can learn so much from them. First of all, they were very brave to agree to talk about their camp experiences because today it is not popular. When there is such a climate in society, then people do not want additional problems. And without their stories, that film would not be what it is. They agreed after 70 years for the first time to go to the places of their suffering, to the places of the former camps and be our guides. First of all, they are wonderful people. We often wondered how anyone could survive what they went through. Certainly, all of us in the team learned a lot from them about life and everything a person can survive, we are much less spoiled.

Both thematically and visually, the film is associated with the famous "Schindler's List", how do you comment on those parallels?

It's kind of our Schindler's List, because it's about an individual who saved a lot of people's lives during World War II, but Schindler's and Diana's story are different. Schindler initially saves the Jews for his own benefit, because he needs the free labor saga. And then he changes as a man, he realizes what the Nazi death camps are and in the end all he wants is to save as many people as possible. From the beginning, Diana acts out of humanism, from the intuition that something very bad will happen if they don't act, gathers associates, risks her own life. Cinematically, they are also very different, but we will leave that to the viewers to draw their own conclusions.

How is it that no one before you ventured into transferring Diana's incredible story to film? Why did we all know so little about a woman who made an incredible humanitarian effort in the darkest of times?

There were some attempts, but they failed. Diana's story is very attractive, but telling it required a lot of work, research, thinking, which always ends up translating into money, your motivation and a long period of time working on the film, and not everyone is ready for that. The script was the biggest problem, how to fit such a big story into one film. At a film workshop, my mentor told me that such serious historical scenes take seven years to write. Co-screenwriter Jelena Paljan and I laughed and said that we don't have that much time, we won't devote a quarter of our lives to one film, but in the end that's exactly what happened.

You bravely made a film that deals with a very painful and sensitive topic at a time when serious historical revisionism is taking place in Croatia, but also in other neighboring countries, where the Ustaše and other similar movements are glorified and the infamous actors of that time are rehabilitated. What was it like to work in such an atmosphere?

Certainly, I was greatly influenced by my environment and the schizophrenic atmosphere surrounding the attempt to completely revise history. If the weather wasn't so crazy, maybe I would be more relaxed, maybe I would give myself more time off, maybe work on the film would take less time. This is how it seemed to me that the most important thing is that the film be true, that there is no dispute about the facts presented in it, and that no one can say after watching it, even if it is just a film. This is a documentary film, but with a lot of emotions. This is a film that tries to restore hope in people, in humanism. As beautifully said by Alma Prica (who plays Diana Budisavljević, ed.) at one of the premieres: "Crimes cannot be denied, but kindness must not be hidden either." We have completely lost our balance and only talk about other people's crimes. We hide our own, as if some kind of victory can be won in that.

Is Diana and her feat, talking about it and everything that happened in the past a path to reconciliation, to an honest and true confrontation with the past, to the development of a culture of memory?

Certainly "Dnevnik Diana Budisavljević" is an unprecedented historical film in our region, special in the way it tells a historical story. Many point to this as one of the greatest qualities of the film, its disapproval, calmness, unpretentiousness, dignity, the fact that there is no pathos, despite the difficult subject matter. I always cheer for that film to be seen on the big screen because it really has a strong effect on the viewer and somehow it's easier when we share those emotions, a kind of catharsis occurs.

I fear a return to church radicalism

It is known that you are an activist, as you stated in an interview, for various rights. What is it about? Did you accompany that activism with a film?

I try to actively support everything related to LGBT rights, women's rights, defense of the secular state. Now I arrive less and less, but I am always with them in my thoughts. I fear a return to church radicalism. The Church in Croatia strongly encourages groups that fight for the prohibition of abortion, often expresses itself very ugly about women as second-rate, less important, does not sanction the glorification of the Ustasha in its ranks, aggressively pushes for school education, stigmatizes children who do not go to religious education , not to mention how much the state allocates for the Catholic Church and how the Church does not pay taxes, nor is it obliged to submit transparent reports on its operations. People need faith and I respect that a lot. But the Church in the political sense is, in my opinion, a very negative factor.

And the fact that I am a lesbian is not a secret, I made a film about it "Your life is not the song of Hawaii", which was also shown in Montenegro. I used to be very scared that my world would come crashing down when they found out I was gay. And that's why I made that film, to get rid of that fear. It was a really hard fight with myself, but now it's much easier.

Is it your sense of activism that brought you closer to Diana and her incredible effort and enterprise?

I think that the closest thing to Diana was my fear of war, and some feeling of helplessness that I remember as a fifteen-year-old girl, not knowing what to do. I was amazed at how Diana knew what to do and how she did it. She is a great inspiration to me.

The Pula jury was guided by quality, and "General" did not meet expectations

The film is the absolute winner of the Pula Festival and left far behind the favored Vrdoljak's "General", which was reputed to be a favorite, and which is the total opposite of your work. How do you explain that, considering the increasing return and glorification of the past, which is not really praiseworthy?

At the Pula Film Festival, two things are fantastic and you rarely find them at other festivals. The first is the Pula Arena, which can accommodate several thousand people, and the second is that the jury watches the films together with the audience and can feel their reactions exactly. In that, "Dnevnik Diana Budisavljević" was unique in the recent history of the festival. No one remembers that a film was watched with such silence and concentration, and that after the end of the film 5.000 people stood up and applauded for eight minutes. The film "General", which is the most expensive Croatian film ever and a major state project, which was accompanied by major marketing, of course, aroused in everyone the feeling that there must be a winner, since Pula is a national film festival. But the jury was still guided by film qualities, and "The General" did not meet expectations. That's why I sometimes say that "Diana" is more than a movie, it's an event and an experience, it's a message that you should work seriously and not give up.

The film is also shown in Serbia, what are the reactions, how were you received there?

The film had a wonderful triple premiere in Belgrade as part of the Free Zone festival, and has been in theaters since mid-November. It is already in the third week on the list of the 10 most watched films that are currently showing in Serbia. It did very well in Croatia, it recently opened cinemas in Bosnia and Herzegovina, we hope to arrange distribution for Montenegro as well. Otherwise, the film was created as a Croatian-Slovenian-Serbian co-production with the help of European funds Media and Eurimages. Although Montenegro did not contribute its own funds to the production of the film, you may be pleased to know that two of the producers, Miljenka Čogelja from Croatia and Vlado Bulajić from Slovenia, are Montenegrins by one parent.