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“I asked my mum once; I didn’t know the correct word for ‘Serb’: ‘Mum, am I a Srbenka?’ I started to cry because until the age of seven I considered myself a Croat.”

This is a story told by 12-year-old Nina in the Croatian documentary ‘Srbenka’ – named after her own made-up word for a female Serb – which won an award for the best documentary of the year at the Cannes Film Festival in May.

The award was received in Cannes on May 12 by its director Nebojsa Slijepcevic, whose film follows the rehearsals and premiere of a theatre play about Aleksandra Zec, a 12-year-old Croatian Serb who was executed along with her parents in Zagreb during the war in December 1991.

The case, notorious because the perpetrators are known but have never been punished, was made into a play by a provocative Croatian director Oliver Frljic, whose work deals with the troubles of the past.

His play ‘Aleksandra Zec’ premiered in the Croatian coastal city of Rijeka in 2014, amid protests and public disapproval from the media, war veterans’ groups and politicians.

“I came to the idea for the film when Frljic started preparing his play, because I already had an idea to work a film that would deal with different truths, with quotation marks or without them, that exist in our society, which are not all equally desirable in the public discourse,” Slijepcevic told BIRN.

He explained that “in theory, we live in a pluralist society”, but in reality, there are truths that are ‘known’ – the officially-sanctioned narratives about Croatia – and those that “are better left untold” – the alternative views.

Ghosts of the past

When he learned of Frljic’s upcoming play, Slijepcevic knew that he wanted to something on the subject of “battles with the ghosts of the past” – although he emphasised that he is only interested in the past as much as it works to “create the present”.

“Although this film seems to be about the past, it actually deals with the present, the generations that are growing up today,” he explained.

He said he was not sure in the beginning whether or not anything would come out of watching the rehearsals. It was only on the third day that he realised he was going to make a film when he met Nina, who became the protagonist of ‘Srbenka’.

Four 12-year-old girls were supposed to play small roles in the play. Slijepcevic explained that while the other three girls were “completely relaxed”, Nina – whose surname is not given in the film – “looked uneasy from the beginning”.

In the documentary, Nina’s unease is visible in her facial expressions – she bites her lip – which the director saw as interesting from a visual point of view.

“Soon I learned the background to everything. Nina, besides being the only ethnic Serb in this group of girls, actually remembers that moment in her life when she realised that she was not a Croat, but a Serb,” he said.

Referring to the moment when Nina describes herself as a ‘Srbenka’, Slijepcevic explained that she saw being a Serb as something ‘bad’ in Croatia.

“Her story itself was so painful and sad, and unfortunately, so symptomatic of Croatia today, that I realised that the film is about that,” he added.

Before choosing Nina as the main protagonist, Slijepcevic talked with her mother, who gave her permission. He said he presumes that Nina and her mother assessed that “the situation in Croatia is still not so dangerous as to show the Other” – in this case, the ‘other’ meaning the country’s Serb minority.

This is why he believes it is still not too late to stop the radicalisation of Croatian society. Over the past five years, several incidents have caused unease among the Serb minority in Croatia, from historical revisionism of the Croatian World War II fascist Ustasa movement and an initiative to limit the public use of the Cyrillic script, to anti-Serb chants on concerts and initiatives to limit Serb minority’s political representation.

A basis for fear

Poster for the film. Photo courtesy of Restart.

At the beginning and the end of the film, there is also another girl of Serb ethnicity who recalls her experiences of growing up in Croatia. She looks at the ‘Aleksandra Zec’ play in the film and then gives her reactions to it.

“She really experienced the play and the show personally due to her own experience. She was born in 1991 and spent her childhood in Croatia shortly after the war in an area that experienced it, so the situation was further polarised,” Slijepcevic explained.

Another Serb girl, who was 19 at the time, was initially supposed to have that role in the film. She gave her reactions to the play for Slijepcevic’s documentary, but when it was edited, she asked for her scenes to be cut out.

Slijepcevic said that apparently she had just got a job and did not want her superiors at work to see her in the film.

The director said he thinks that “even the existence of this fear indicates the existence of some basis for it, which we could have witnessed over in recent years when the mainstream opened for extremists”.

In the film, actors from the ‘Aleksandra Zec’ play also recount their experience of growing up in Croatia in the 1990s.

One actor, also a Serb, recalled how he also used to hide his ethnic background and wrote his father’s name Simo – a Serb name – as Šimo, so it resembled the Croat name Šime.

Another actor, who was a Croat from the eastern part of the country, recalled how he and his family had to flee amid an attack by the Yugoslav People’s Army and Serb paramilitaries. He talks about how he was indoctrinated into hating “the other side” because of the crimes they committed.

Nebojsa Slijepcevic. Photo courtesy of Nebojsa Slijepcevic.

All these different experiences of growing up in the 1990s, according to Slijepcevic, give “a cross-section of Croatian society as well as presenting diametrically opposed experiences”.

“I’m just talking about the people who were on the same side, so they didn’t fight against Croatia. I’m talking about people who were neighbours in big cities, but they still had very different experiences, equally painful for different reasons,” he added.

The film shows disputes during the play’s rehearsals between Frljic and some of the actors, who argue about whether or not the play is so too radical. Some actors also have second thoughts about doing the play.

At the end of the film, the camera shows the audience at the play’s premiere in Rijeka, and follows Nina as she leave the theatre alone.

A jury member at the Nyon Film Festival, which gave the film the Buyens-Chagoll award – a sort of human rights award – wrote a letter to the director saying that the film should be screened as mandatory in high schools.

“I would certainly like our schools to be open to different truths, not just my film,” Slijepcevic said.

“As far as I know, the only film that made it to schools is [Jakov] Sedlar’s movie about Jasenovac, screened during [Catholic] religious education classes,” he noted with laughter, referring to the controversial 2016 film about the Croatian World War II concentration camp at Jasenovac.

Nevertheless, he added, he hopes that regardless of their political orientation or background, audiences will be moved by the tale of the 12-year-old ‘Srbenka’.