Scenes of life after wartime

As sites for film festival press conferences go, it would be hard to improve on the East West Beach Club. Beautifully situated on the shockingly blue Adriatic Sea, it has a postcard view of this city’s 15th and 16th century walls. Likely the best preserved vintage fortification system in the world, these battlements look very much like something Jack Warner might have ordered up for an action-adventure epic.

The Dubrovnik International Film Festival used the club for the opening press conference of its second year. The Croatian media, both local and national, had shown up in force.

The festival itself had gotten considerable coverage in Croatia for its 2003 debut, with press headlines like the irrepressible “Cannes is Dead, Long Live Dubrovnik!” The second year under founder and festival director Ziggy Mrkich was shaping up to be just as potent, including the local premier of Croatian director Vinko Bresan’s riveting, controversial “Witnesses,” perhaps the best film to deal with the war in what everyone now calls simply “ex-Yugoslavia.”

But at its midpoint press conference something had gone wrong. The techno-pop was on the speaker system, the bottles of mineral water were close at hand, and the guest of honor, top Croatian director Krsto Papic, was there. Only one thing was unnervingly absent: the press itself. And Papic thought he knew why.

He has been making films for nearly 40 years, even directing Orson Welles as J.P. Morgan in 1980’s “The Secret of Nikola Tesla.” Papic’s latest film, “Infections,” was having its national premier at Dubrovnik and showing as well was his classic 1970 work “Lisice” (Handcuffs), considered as good a film as any made inside the former Soviet bloc.

A thoughtful, articulate man who spent a year at USC on a Fulbright fellowship, Papic said the lack of press had to do with the kind of materialistic society he feared Croatia, a new country admitted to the U.N. in 1992, was becoming. His press conference was without press, the director explained, because of the lure of a rival media event, complete with entertainment and a lavish buffet, being held just 20 minutes outside of town.

“The president of Croatia is coming today to open a new luxury hotel,” Papic explained, as much in resignation as in despair. “The film festival is not the event, the whole spirit of the town is in that opening. This is our society, this is a real picture of us.

“I call my generation ‘Lost in Transition,’ ” Papic went on, with a conscious nod to the Sofia Coppola film. “During communism, we were dreaming of democracy. Then it came, but it is a false democracy in my opinion.

“Everything that is bad in Western society came. We don’t have a middle class, we have a small group of very rich, and 90% of the people are hardly surviving. What kind of society, what kind of democracy is this?”

The director gestures again to the uncrowded room. “This is your chance to picture the essence of a country in transition. The reality is going on in front of you.” A pause, followed by a wry “We are lost.”

Behind the scenes

I had come to Dubrovnik to get a look at a young film festival, to find out how one of these events goes about getting started, and I did. But I also found out something more.

The Dubrovnik event turned out to be an unexpected opportunity to examine a film culture and a society still coming to terms with a devastating catastrophe a decade-plus after the fact. It was a way to observe the political and human aftershocks of war in a place that never expected to be under fire, and to see how those tremors affected both the kinds of films being made and how they are received.

To look up at the delightful green hills gently dotted with cypress trees that ring the city is to feel as Dubrovnik’s residents did in 1991: that it would be unimaginable for the war that led to the breakup of Yugoslavia to touch down in this nonstrategic location, beautiful enough to be the image of choice for guidebook covers and one of only three cities in Europe to be designated World Heritage Sites by the U.N.

Yet the war did arrive here, and with a force that stunned the inhabitants. The Serb-Montenegrin-dominated Yugoslav army bombarded the city with more than 2,000 shells from October 1991 through the following summer. More than two-thirds of the old town’s distinctive red-tiled roofs were hit, and total damage, including the destruction of a 25,000-book library, has been estimated at $10 million. According to Robin Harris’ authoritative “Dubrovnik: A History,” 221 people died and the city’s tourist industry was “destroyed.”

Ten years and more down the line, those roofs have been replaced, the damaged architectural treasures rebuilt. Croatia is running ads on European TV touting itself as “the Mediterranean as it once was,” and the tourists, though not at pre-war levels, are returning to experience the city’s dazzling interplay of limestone and pure light and understand why George Bernard Shaw said “those who seek Paradise on Earth should come to Dubrovnik.”

But as much as people understandably want to put the war and its aftermath behind them, they can’t completely. Good and pleasant as life is now, with hotels crowded, traces of the past are visible if you know where to look. And if you care enough to ask, you can find memories of discord just below the surface of people’s minds, still roiling the placid waters of current prosperity.

So, sharing window space with dolls in native costumes and souvenir ashtrays in a shop just off the Stradum, the city’s main street, is a book called “Dubrovnik In War,” with a surreal photo of the city in smoke and flames on its cover. A video, “War In Dubrovnik,” is available around the corner. And a few streets away, upstairs in what used to be the old town’s hardware store, sits War Photo Limited, a gallery, possibly the first in the world to be devoted to the photography of war.

Newly opened under the direction of Wade Goddard, himself a former war photographer, the gallery’s first exhibitions are devoted to searing images of the war in ex-Yugoslavia. Showing in the gallery’s small video theater, doing double duty as an auxiliary film festival screening site, is a brief documentary about the extremely hostile reaction these photographs got when the show was on tour in Serbia. The reaction in Dubrovnik, while much quieter, has also been intense.

“Most of the local people are happy to have something different, educators especially are very grateful,” says Goddard, a New Zealand native. But, he adds, “there is always the odd comment about ‘Why aren’t there photos of Croatian soldiers looking more heroic?’ ”

Then, Goddard says, there’s the reaction of “the woman who runs the cafe next door. She didn’t want to look at any photos. Finally, she came, and within five minutes she was crying. Some local people don’t come because it’s too hard for them. The memories are too strong.”

A festival takes shape

When 38-year-old festival founder Mrkich came to Dubrovnik four years ago as part of a visit to nearby parents, she was taken by the spirit of the city and the country’s rebuilding process. “I was at that phase in my life where I needed to take things into my own hands, to be in control,” she says. “I thought, ‘This is so beautiful, the war’s over, it’s going to take off. How could I do something here?’ I came up with the idea of a film festival.”

While neighboring Serbia has 14 film festivals of various kinds, and Bosnia’s well-regarded Sarajevo Film Festival just celebrated its 10th anniversary, Croatia has only four, including one in Pula, once ex-Yugoslavia’s biggest festival and a favorite of Marshal Tito, the country’s ruler and something of a movie buff.

Tito would stay on a nearby island and have features shuttled out to him every night. “When the boat returned with the films,” one director remembers, “the projectionist would tell us ‘he laughed’ or ‘he stopped the projection.’ Very often the films he loved became favorites at the festival.”

Though it didn’t have a film event, what Dubrovnik did have is one of Europe’s foremost summer theater and music festivals, over half a century old and so big it uses 30 venues for performances. “That made it a little harder,” Mrkich admits. “People would say, ‘We already have a festival.’ And there are only so many local sponsors to go around.” That made the support of Dubrovnik’s mayor, Dubravka Suica, essential, and she turned out to have big-picture reasons of her own to be enthusiastic.

“This city lives exclusively on tourism, and the modern tourist wants cultural events,” Suica said. “We are strongly connected to culture, culture is everything to us, we give 50% of our budget to theater, the symphony orchestra, museums, galleries.

“We want to have festivals all year round. Americans were a big percentage of tourists before the war. We want to attract them again.”

Still, the mayor says Mrkich’s role as catalyst was essential. “Nothing would have happened here without Ziggy Mrkich,” she says.

Mrkich was born in Australia of Croatian parents who moved back to the country when she was 13. In 1995, Mrkich moved to Hollywood to get involved in the film business. “It’s a tough place for females, for Australians, to work your way up the ladder,” she says. “If you don’t fit into the cookie-cutter development executive thing, they don’t want you.” Then came the film festival idea and an unexpected opportunity to be creative.

“As soon as it hatched in my brain it possessed me,” Mrkich says. “It’s kept me going for the last four years, coming home after work and researching, thinking, planning, reading. It’s all I think about, all I do.”

Everything about starting and running a festival, however, turned out to be “harder than I anticipated,” Mrkich says. Local would-be volunteers “refused to understand the concept of volunteering” and demanded to be paid. And getting sponsorships and raising money was especially difficult because “American companies don’t even know Croatia exists. Next year I’m going to try Britain; Croatia is the No. 1 location where the British buy European real estate.”

Coming from a culture where “people like to sit in cafes,” audiences weren’t always eager to get up and find seats in the festival’s wonderfully eclectic group of theaters, which include a stunningly-sited outdoor venue with a 1950s-style rhomboid screen and baby blue trim, and the Marin Drzic, an exquisite three-tiered theatrical house dating from 1864. Still, 2003’s first festival got good marks from the citizenry.

For the 2003 event, Mrkich had lined up the national premier of Woody Allen’s “Anything Else” for opening night, but the focus this year turned out to be the Croatian connection, including the presentation of the 15th annual Hartley-Merrill International Screenwriting Prize to a Croatian writer, Iva Kapetanovic, another person who couldn’t get the war out of her mind and set her script in the once-besieged city of Vukovar.

Brenda Brkusic, a 23-year-old recent Chapman University graduate, came with a personal documentary about her politically active father, “Freedom From Despair.” On a much lighter note was Zoran Budak’s irresistible half-hour doc, “Cooking for Hollywood,” about how Croatian immigrant Toni Kalem founded Tony’s Food Service of Chatsworth, one of the movie business’ premier location caterers, and became the chef of choice for Clint Eastwood (“He adores Croatian food”) and John Travolta.

The chance to see the veteran Papic’s new film was one of the festival’s coups. The director himself, though, was more excited to have a big-screen showing of his 1970 “Handcuffs,” a Kafkaesque parable about paranoia and power. Morally complex and psychologically acute, set in a remote area in 1948 on the day of a lively village wedding, it deals with the nature of totalitarianism and its ability to cause poisonous breakdowns in society. And it turns out to have a history as dramatic as what is on the screen.

Though “Handcuffs” was invited to be in Cannes’ official competition in 1970, Yugoslavia’s official film committee, taking it as an attack against the current regime, refused to allow it to represent the country there. “Handcuffs” was shown instead to great success at the Directors Fortnight, and Papic, who considered his career in his homeland to be over, was thinking about emigrating to France with his family when he got a call from his producer.

To the director’s astonishment, this outcast film had won several prizes at Pula, the key Yugoslavian festival, including the coveted Grand Prix. How to explain this? Papic smiles: “Tito saw the film and he liked it.” The director shakes his head, still not quite believing it. “Tito, the only free man in Yugoslavia.”

If Papic represents, in his own words, a group in transition, 40-year-old Vinko Bresan, once Papic’s assistant, is part of what the younger director calls “the new kids.” An energetic man with an expressive face, Bresan is perhaps the most accomplished filmmaker of his generation. But no one was prepared for what he achieved in his latest film, the devastating “Witnesses.”

That was because Bresan, who wrote his first two films in collaboration with his writer-father Ivo (“He can’t say no or my mother will be angry”), has been known exclusively as the creator of comedies. Sharp, satiric and very funny comedies, but comedies nevertheless.

Evolution in style

Bresan’s first film, the wonderfully titled “How the War Started on My Island,” became, except for James Cameron’s “Titanic,” Croatia’s top-grossing film of the last 20 years. He followed that with 1999’s droll and pointed “Marshal Tito’s Spirit.”

“I didn’t want to make comedy for itself, I used humor as a way to tell the story,” the director explains. “When (former Croatian president Franjo) Tudman was alive, what dominated cultural politics was a celebration of everything. My resistance to this took the form of a carnivalization of life. But those cultural politics disappeared after Tudman died. Now we have a different social situation.”

And, successful and savvy as these films were, Bresan says, “I didn’t want to do just childish comedies all my life.” Enter “Witnesses.”

“I felt obligated as a director to say something about the moral problems of my society, and if I do that I have no right to use humor as a disguise,” Bresan says, explaining “Witnesses’ ” serious tone. “No one here wants to think of the past, but unfortunately we are living in the past. We are deeply in the past.”

Adapted from a novel by Jurica Pavicic, this assured, confidently cinematic and daring film is set in 1992 in an unnamed city near the front lines. A trio of disgruntled Croatian soldiers decide to blow up the house of a local Serb, a wealthy war profiteer they think is out of town. He isn’t, and ineptitude leads to the man’s death and his daughter’s kidnapping.

As both a detective and a journalist go against local sentiment and pursue separate investigations into the incident, “Witnesses” (“Svjedoci” in Croatian) looks into areas most societies would prefer to avoid examining. What does armed conflict do to social order and individual responsibility? How does the wartime emphasis on clannishness, compromise and a malleable “what nobody saw never really happened” code of ethics impact national morality? Is it possible, finally, to have a moral dilemma in an immoral world?

As if the subject matter weren’t enough to make “Witnesses” stand out, Bresan’s decision about structure makes it even more compelling. His first cut followed the conventional pattern of linear storytelling, but he and co-screenwriter Pavicic found that “all the emotional levels we wanted to show didn’t happen.”

So Bresan restructured the film by fragmenting it, by having the story told and retold from the overlapping points of view of different central characters, with each retelling adding key details and texture and the whole truth only apparent at the close.

“Witnesses” won six awards at Pula, including best director for Bresan, and was extremely well received at its international debut at the Berlin Film Festival.

But as far as the reaction at home went, Bresan says, “Berlin made it worse. Every good reaction overseas is bad for me here.” Finally, he says, “two months ago, the Croatian party of the right, a powerful party, accused me of being an enemy of the state, a traitor.”

Don’t misunderstand, Bresan says. “I am happy I can make this film here, there are a lot of people who like it, nobody is beating me on the street, I am not a lonely revolutionary.”

For Bresan, the present looks promising. He has an agent at United Talent who regularly sends him scripts, he is doing a short film for the Croatian pavilion at EXPO 2005 in Japan, and “Witnesses” is in the hands of a top European distributor.

But just under the surface of success for the director, as it is for many Croatians, are concerns about that past, about the difference the war made in their lives.

“From books, films, everyone thinks they know something about war,” Bresan explains, quiet but forceful. “But the one thing nobody prepared me for, the worst change, was in the minds of people. It is how society treats the value of humanity in a war situation. That’s the reason why I made this film.

“In peace, if you are a good person, you are very valuable for society. In a war situation, if you hate you are valuable. If you hate more, you are more valuable. I lost a lot of friends during the war -- they hate too much, I cannot have conversations with them. The state encourages that in people’s souls. After that, everything is possible.

“Holes in roofs are easy to fix,” Vinko Bresan says, the carefully repaired skyline of the old city glistening behind him. “People’s souls are very heavy to fix. Those kinds of shadows are still standing. The job for intellectuals, for artists, is to fix that kind of thinking.”