In February of 1993, a train on its way from Belgrade in Serbia to Bar in Montenegro was stopped at the Strpci railway station by paramilitary forces. They boarded the 500-strong transport demanding to see IDs and around 20 people were taken away, never to be seen again. Nebojsa Slijepcevic’s short film, The Man Who Could Not Remain Silent, won the top prize for the short form at this year’s Cannes Film Festival and tells the story of this tragedy and witnesses the actions of one man who refused to stand silently by while it happened.
The Film Verdict caught up with Slijepcevic in November 2024 to discuss the making of the film, his relationship with the short form, and what his original inspiration was.
As writer and director, what was your initial starting point with this film? Were you familiar with the events depicted in the film, or did you know you wanted to explore this general subject?
“Neither, actually. I did not know about this story, but five years ago, Daniel Peck, a producer at Antitalent, sent me a piece written for the 20th anniversary of the crime. He wrote about how Tomo Buzov was forgotten from the collective memory, although he was a hero. The piece explained that he was forgotten intentionally, because Buzov doesn’t fit into the nationalistic narratives that are dominant in all post-Yugoslavian countries. Daniel and I wondered; ‘can we make a short film based on the story?’ I was inspired by the story – ‘inspired’ is maybe not the right word, but what Tomo Buzov did was extraordinary, something that very few people would do. It ended tragically for him, but I think heroic acts like this should be remembered. He was not fighting with guns; he was fighting with his words. I saw something universal in this story, something that is not connected to Bosnia in 1993 but something that I, and I believe many viewers, can identify with. This is the position of being a witness of a crime. It is a position that that all of us can find ourselves in, no matter if we’re in a in a war zone or not. It is a position that whole societies find themselves in, you know? Especially now, when we have armed conflicts all over the world. Although it is far away, when measured in miles or kilometres, everything is connected now and we cannot look away or stay silent – or can we? That’s the question.”
That perspective, of the witness, is a striking thing about the film. Tomo Buzov is not your protagonist, instead we see the action from the point of view of someone who does not speak up.
“Yes, that was the idea from the first moment. When we talked about the film, immediately we all agreed that it shouldn’t be about the hero, but about everybody else on this train. Also, for me, it’s hard to write from the position of a hero, because I’m not a hero. I don’t know how. In that train, I probably would remain silent as well. Most of the audience that will ever watch the film would be silent witnesses, so it’s a very human, understandable position. It’s the only position that most of us have the right to tell this story from – I don’t think that audiences have the right to identify with the hero, because none of us are heroes, or almost nobody.”
What was the process of getting the film funded like. Presumably if Daniel came to you with the story, you had good support right from the outset?
“Definitely, I had really fantastic support from the producers, Antitalent, but also Bulgarian, French, and Slovenian co-producers. All of them really invested emotionally in the story, not only as professionals. We also had quite a long period from the script until shooting. I think almost three years, maybe a little bit less. It gave me enough time to really plan the film very carefully. It was the bright side of this whole process because it was quite a demanding set – we filmed in a real train, which was also sometimes moving, and had to fit all the crew, actors, extras. We wanted this train to feel really packed and claustrophobic and I did not want to it to look like a run-and-gun documentary, I wanted to be polished. So, it all needed to be very carefully planned. I had a very precise storyboard and by the first day of shooting, we had basically planned everything to such detail that what you see on the screen, in the end, is all the shots that we shot. We didn’t have one extra shot that we didn’t use.”
Is that how you typically like to work, even when shooting in different situations?
“Well, a large part of my career was making documentaries. In documentary, it’s very easy to come home with 100 hours of material, but I really don’t like that. So, I trained on documentaries to plan – even when it’s completely unpredictable. I’ve always tried to pre-plan my shoots. I even did couple of direct cinema documentaries, which are completely unpredictable, but still tried not to start the camera if I’m not at least 70% sure that I will use this material. So that’s how I try to work, yeah.”
I wanted to ask you about working with actors given the confines of the shoot, but also in asking your lead actor, Goran Bogdan, to be quite a passive character.
“Goran is a well-known actor in the region and, I think, internationally. He’s a fantastic actor and I really wanted him. He was my first choice. I knew that this role was someone who thinks that he’s a hero, and the audience should think that he’s the hero, and then during the film, he discovers something about himself. Goran has this heroic appearance, like a cliche from a Hollywood film where there is a macho, good-looking, tall man going to save the situation for everybody. So, we played a little bit on this stereotype with him, but also, he’s fantastic actor. I knew from the very first moment that most of the film focus on his face, and I knew that he would have to break up in the close-up, and to break up in a way that he tries to hide it from everybody around him. I needed a great actor who is really method, at least in the way that he can internalize, completely, his emotional change, but still, you see it on camera. I’ve seen Goran doing some fantastic roles before, in other films, and I knew he could do it. In the script, everything was pretty much the same as the film, but it was all a little bit more extroverted from everybody. There was a little bit more shouting and pushing in the script than it is in the final film – this subtle change of making the film quieter, and scarier – was thanks to the actors.”
Finally, I just wanted to ask you about your relationship to the short film form.
“I have experience with feature-length and short documentaries but in fiction only with shorts. In documentaries, it’s always harder for me to make a short than a feature, which maybe sounds counterintuitive, but it is because in a short film, every single thing, every second counts. You have to be very rational with what information you need or what information you don’t need. You have a very short time to create emotion, which I find much more demanding than making a feature documentary. I guess it’s similar with this film, and because of that, I really consider short film to be like a separate art form which has equal value to feature film. Some people look at short films and think they are for students or people at the beginning of their career, but I don’t consider it like that. It is a great challenge to make a good short film. For The Man Who Could Not Remain Silent, I never envisioned it as anything other than a short film. A lot of people asked if I plan to make a feature based on the same story, but from the very first minute, it was a short film. It’s really this minimalistic approach to the information and to try to create suspense and emotion in the short time, and that’s what I hope we succeeded in.”
Read our review of The Man Who Could Not Remain Silent here.
