the form of French company Memento, which represented last year’s winner – Iranian film Divorce: Nader and Simin, and that they have a good distributor in America. It’s really hard to predict anything for any award, as there are many things that influence the result. ■ The film won three awards at this year’s 60th Pula Film Festival: Best Director, Best Actor (Leon Lučev) and Best Minority Co-production. You described the award for Best Director in Pula as the realisation
■ The basis of the story of Circles is an event related to the armed conflict in the former Yugoslavia. If we know that the world public generally does not have a positive attitude regarding our recent history, you risked having your Circles greeted with this bias. However, it happened that the American and European audiences and critics experienced the film positively and with praise. How would you comment on that? - I tried to make Circles our story and for it to relate to and hurt us in the former
Art can influence the individual to be more humane, better, and I believe that such an individual can change the world with his deeds of a childhood dream. How was that dream formed? - As a child I went with my parents to the Pula Film Festival every year, given that my father was also a director. Pula was then filled with glamour and it was the most important film event in Yugoslavia. That is how I met and was close to many Yugoslav film stars and saw the brighter side of directorial work. I also shot my first film in Pula, with an 8mm camera. I was four years old.
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Yugoslavia, but also to have a universal idea and narration. I have always admired Kurosawa, who translated Japanese culture into Shakespearean narrative structure and thus made his works universal and understandable everywhere. At that time he suffered a lot of criticism in Japan that he had betrayed the Japanese tradition and culture, but today his work is a symbol of Japanese art. I wanted to achieve this kind of uni-
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versality with Circles. I think that the question of heroism, which the film addresses, is universal. Such a story could happen anywhere, in a different context and with other actors. This film speaks to people who are willing to be open. Among us there are this kind and that kind. Circles says that among us lived Srđan Aleksić, a great man, a hero, but there were also those who beat him to death in the middle of the square in Trebinje. This film tries to understand everyone’s truth. Therefore even Todor, who was one of the killers, played by Boris Isaković, has his truth and in the film he has the right to say it even though I disagree with him. I think, therefore, that the story is universal and that is what actually gives it that, so to say, aura of a movie that has success on all continents. ■ The film tells a story which is still a very sensitive subject here - the relationship between nations, without any political connotations. How did you achieve that? - The deed of Srđan Aleksić was not political, it was a human deed. That fact eliminated the possibility of a strong political context and political manipulation. And I am also not interested in making a political film. Politics is the set design of the film, but it is not its essence. Srđan Aleksić primarily did a human deed – it was a supranational and supra-religious act and I think it would not be fair on him and his heroic act for that the film to be on anyone’s side, except on the human side. It was important for me to explain that the film tells a human story, a story about people trying to get out of the shadow of events that marked their lives. ■ Critics positively noted your decision, and of course also the decision of screenwriter Srđan Koljević, to unload the film of dialogue in favour of emotion. Does that also open the film up to a foreign audience? - Circles is a film about that which is not spoken. For me the dialogue in the film is meaningless, it is important what heroes feel, not what they say. In this I see the beauty of the