Students at the Academy of Arts in Belgrade have announced that the footage, which some media outlets claim shows students practicing faking incidents, is part of a film and has been taken out of context.
They say that a month ago they started filming a documentary film, the theme of which is student protests.
The idea of the film, as they explain, is to pay homage to those who died in the Novi Sad canopy collapse, as well as to their beaten and run over colleagues and students.
At the protest in Kragujevac, one of the scenes was filmed in a secluded street for security reasons, in which students and citizens participated, and the regime media published the footage and labeled it as "an example of faking traffic at student blockades."
The film crew explained to N1 that "certain media outlets took the footage out of context and used it to spin a narrative about the alleged rigging of the student protests."
"Regarding the report published on 16.02.2025, in the National News of RTV Pink at 15.00, and later broadcast on the portals and news of TV Prva, Informer and B92, which shows an allegedly staged and arranged filming of an incident between demonstrators and drivers - we would like to inform the public that the footage in question was created during the filming of a student film by a fourth-year student of the Faculty of Directing at the Academy of Arts in Belgrade, in which some students of the Academy of Arts in Belgrade, as well as several colleagues from other faculties, participated as extras and actors," they stated in the statement.
Informer was the first to announce that their editorial team had come into "possession of shocking footage that sheds a completely new light on traffic incidents that occurred during the so-called student protests across Serbia."
"As young filmmakers, we support the right to freedom of expression and artistic expression, but we do not agree with our work being misused for political purposes," the film's crew said in response to the publication.
They stated that they were at the disposal of state authorities.
"We are making ourselves available to the competent authorities, to whom we can provide all necessary evidence upon request, to make it clear that this is not about filming staged attacks on students, as maliciously reported by the aforementioned portals and media," the film crew, students from the Academy of Arts in Belgrade, said in a statement.
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