This week, the Asymptote blog is excited to share a special two-part engagement with Croatian filmmaker Rajko Grlić. Today in Part I, we bring you an interview between Grlić and Ellen Elias-Bursać, who, in addition to being an Asymptote contributing editor, is also the editor of the first English translation of Grlić’s memoirs.
Don’t forget to check back for Part II tomorrow, when Asymptote will have an exclusive excerpt from Rajko Grlić’s memoir!
Croatian filmmaker Rajko Grlić organizes the material of his memoir, Long Story Short, like a lexicon of filmmaking terminology. Under each heading and definition, he includes a story from his life: his filmmaking; his struggles against nationalism in Croatia during the war of the 1990s; and his years of teaching at NYU, UCLA, and Ohio University. Grlić was known as one of the leading Yugoslav filmmakers in 1980s Croatia, celebrated for such box-office successes as You Love Only Once (1981); In the Jaws of Life (1984), which was based on a Dubravka Ugrešić novel; and That Summer of White Roses (1989). He left Croatia in the 1990s during its war for independence and has since gone on to make several more notable films, including The Border Post (2006) and The Constitution (2016). He collected stories during his many years of making movies and moving through the world, aware that he’d never have the opportunity to make every story he had to tell into a film, but refusing to lose them to oblivion.
Grlić’s memoir was translated by Vesna Radovanović and edited by Ellen Elias-Bursać, who spoke recently to Grlić about the life that led to Long Story Short. In the excerpt, “Festival Selector,” which will be published tomorrow as Part II of this series, Grlić tells of his decades-long friendship with Honorio Rancaño, the selector for movies shown at Mostra, a film festival that was held for many years in Valencia, Spain.
Ellen Elias-Bursać (EEB): In this entry from your memoir, you describe your involvement as a filmmaker in film festivals in Cannes (where the story begins), Spain (Mostra), Japan (Tokyo), Croatia (Pula), and your friendship with Honorio Rancaño, who was born in Spain but went on to live in Russia, Czechoslovakia, Cuba, France, and, ultimately, Spain. What does “place” as such mean to you now? Where have you situated your movies, both in terms of storyline and the locations where they were filmed?
Rajko Grlić (RG): The story about Honorio is a tale of a different world, a world now long gone. About a man who was born in a utopian age, who, after those hopes were shattered, spent his life seeking for something new to hope for. Like any search, his tangled path through space and time touched many places and continents. This is one of the reasons why I believed that his life story, so scattered in bits and pieces all over the world, needed to be told.
As far as my locations are concerned, I, too, have lived abroad in several cities and on several continents. But none of these places moved me deeply enough, if I can put it that way, or provoked me to make a movie about them. I always felt myself to be merely an onlooker who had no right to tell these stories. This is why when I made the movie in Zagreb in 2009, after twenty years away, I felt in my element. I was on familiar streets, venturing into apartments and beds whose smell I remembered, dealing with a life I knew, the life in which most of my films happened.
Zagreb is a small city on the periphery of Europe. In the twentieth century there have been three wars there, two of them world wars, one a civil war. Without ever moving, my mother, during her lifetime, lived in five countries. I was born there, and by that time several generations of my family had lived there. So it is there that I feel I have stories to tell through film. For you can only tell stories about people you know well, the people you worry about, the people for whom the injustices visited upon them or the injustices they have visited upon others, have hurt you personally.
EEB: How far along were you in your career as a filmmaker when the Yugoslav wars broke out and you and your family left Croatia to move to the United States to teach?
RG: I was forty-four when the war began. I’d made my first feature film at twenty-five and spent twenty years, my best years, making a living making movies. This wasn’t easy, financially or politically, but it was possible. Yugoslavia was not a part of the Eastern or the Western Bloc, but something in between. The country was a desirable catch for both the East and the West and as such the regime paid close attention to how it was perceived. When you make movies in a country like this which the local moviegoers enjoy and other countries recognize with awards, then the powers-that-be mostly leave you alone. If they aren’t forced to, they’d rather not jeopardize their good image. Of course, this doesn’t mean that you enjoy absolute immunity. Two of my films were first banned and only later released, I was on a blacklist of cultural enemies said to be destabilizing the state through their work, a roster drawn up by the Central Committee of the Communist Party, but this was something survivable.
Yugoslavia was a strange country, a sort of experiment. Up to the early 1980s it was full of promise for a better tomorrow. And just when the Communists had finally begun to loosen up, listen to other viewpoints, and realize that life is more than mere dogma, they opened the door to multi-party elections, and the nationalists came into power. And these were far-right nationalists. The war, which had been sewn up and delivered in advance, was their first big idea. I felt I had no place here so I left with my family and moved to the United States.
EEB: Did the way you made films after the move to the States change in comparison to the films you’d made before you left?
RG: After I left Croatia, I made no films for the next ten years. In 1999 I began to feel I could make movies again. That was when Croatia’s president, Franjo Tuđman, was hospitalized. After Slobodan Milošević, President of Serbia and the grandmaster of the war, Tuđman deserves the most credit for the Yugoslav wars. So, this moment, this end of what had not been the nicest of times, needed to be fittingly marked. Using my own funds, and later with the support of European and US donations, we made a movie about the end of the Tuđman era and the advent of the new government. We were full of hope at the time that we had before us a completely different political option. The movie was the first full-length documentary made in Croatia to be screened in movie theaters, and that year it was the most popular domestic film.
In 2000, I made my first feature film after my hiatus. It was a German-English coproduction and we filmed it in Germany and the Czech Republic. I made a film in Macedonia in 2005, a coproduction of ten European countries, and then the first feature film I actually shot in in Croatia was in 2009.
EEB: You started a small film festival of your own, held every summer in the little town of Motovun in Croatia, which has been running now for over twenty years, and describes itself as a festival which celebrates authors who stick to their artistic stubbornness, unconventionality, and originality at all costs. What impact has the Motovun Festival had on filmmaking in Croatia and beyond?
RG: The Motovun Film Festival, or, as I call it, The Event, began in 1999. Croatia was a small claustrophobic country at the time and had closed all possible windows out onto the world, so fresh air wouldn’t disturb their nationalist equilibrium.
I started it with students from my Imaginary Film Academy, which I led from 1995 to 2002, also in Istria. Why Istria? This is a northern Adriatic peninsula which breathed differently than the rest of Croatia. It hadn’t succumbed to nationalism, never relinquished anti-Fascism, was surprisingly tolerant of difference. The festival backbone was small movies with big human stories.
In that magical hilltop town where only about three hundred people live year-round, thirty to forty thousand people began showing up for the festival. And writers, painters, composers joined us in Motovun. All through the five days they were working together, filming, hanging out, talking. In the camp below the town there were hundreds of kids, hungry for something different. And perhaps what is most important, we have helped people understand that art, and with it film, cannot be something stifling, patriotic, boring, something that has nothing to do with our everyday lives. All this can be a source of great joy.
Photo credit: NIN/Vesna Lalic
Rajko Grlić was born in 1947 in Zagreb, Croatia and graduated in film directing at FAMU in Prague, Czech Republic in 1971. As a director and scriptwriter, he has worked on eleven theatrical features. These films were shown in cinemas across five continents, and included in competition programs of leading world festivals, including Cannes. They have received numerous international awards. He has worked on five feature films as scriptwriter and on five as producer. He wrote, directed, and produced How to Make Your Movie: An Interactive Film School, which was proclaimed the Best World Multi-media in 1998. He is an Ohio Eminent Scholar in Film at Ohio University, Athens Ohio, USA.
Ellen Elias-Bursać is a contributing editor to Asymptote. She translates fiction and non-fiction from the Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian. She is president of the American Literary Translators Association.
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