Nebojša Slijepčević: Reality is Rarely Black And White

The Sarajevo Film Festival audience already knows Nebojša Slijepčević well. Srbenka won the Heart of Sarajevo for the best documentary film in 2018. Last year we saw the short feature film The Man Who Could Not Remain Silent, which won many awards - the Palme d'Or, the European Film Award, the Cesar Award of the French Film Academy and was nominated for an Oscar©.

 It is obvious that you are an excellent observer of social and political issues and that you like to point the camera at them. As an artist, how much are you intrigued by human evil and human goodness?         
         

What intrigues me most is what lies between these two extremes. It is often difficult to discern who is on the side of good and who is on the side of evil in the mass of contradictory information today and most people are dazed and confused in their attempts to determine where to turn. But good and evil are sometimes a matter of perspective. I firmly believe that most people are on the side of good, they just have a big problem finding where that side is exactly. Reality is rarely black and white, and what interests me most is the search for meaning among the endless shades of grey.

This year you will present the film Red Slide, which you started a long time ago. You started filming the conflict between the citizens of Travno and the city authorities over the usurpation of the local park back in 2006, continued filming related events in another Zagreb neighbourhood, Trnjanska Savica, from 2013 to 2018, and the film was completed this year. It is hard to get rid of the impression that similar events, marked by politics and rooted in our past, are taking place at this moment in many cities in the region. Did the wide applicability and great possibility of understanding make you finally turn this story into a film?

I recognized many forces that govern whole our society in the events in Savica Park. We can see that park as a miniature model of Croatia. Although the main plot of the film takes place 8 years ago, nothing significant has changed in Croatia. It is the same society, the same actors, only the conflicts are in some other parks. And given the similarity of the countries in the region, it is not surprising that the whole situation is very recognizable to viewers in neighbouring countries. In the film, we see paid "activists" who do not even know what they are protesting for. After the premiere in Zagreb, one of the viewers from Serbia called them "shitheads (“ćaci”), version 0.1".

Do you have "in your pocket" more films you've already started that we might host at the Sarajevo Film Festival in the coming years?

 

I am preparing my first feature film, an adaptation of the novel "Black Mother Earth" („Črna mati zemla“) by Kristijan Novak.