Mitrovic: 'We Took Off for Belgrade After a Rough Night'

Jean-Claude Van Damme landed in Belgrade on the afternoon of August 23. By that same evening he was already seated at a table in a Belgrade tavern, in the company of Zeljko Mitrovic. A video of the gathering surfaced on social media and quickly spread across the internet.

The meeting did not happen by chance. The owner of Pink Media Group had personally flown to Sardinia by private plane to bring the Hollywood actor to Serbia. Before the flight to Belgrade, the two of them, according to Mitrovic’s own Instagram post, had been out at clubs in Poltu Quatu and Porto Cervo. Mitrovic wrote about that night out himself, describing the flight back toward Belgrade as well.

“We finally took off for Belgrade from Sardinia, after a rough night!” Zeljko Mitrovic wrote in an Instagram post.

At the table in the tavern, alongside Van Damme and Mitrovic, sat businessman Branko Babic, businessman Toni Bijelic and Informer’s editor in chief Dragan J. Vucicevic. The video was posted from Branko Babic’s profile with a short caption about the evening, and the group appears relaxed on camera, gathered around a full table with drinks and conversation that, judging by the length of the clip, went on for a while.

“A day to remember, the day Jean-Claude Van Damme came to see us,” Branko Babic wrote in the caption of the video on his profile.

The evening in Belgrade is not the only reason for Van Damme’s visit to Serbia. The Hollywood actor is a special guest at the opening ceremony of the International Film Festival in Nis, which runs from August 25 to 30. There he will attend the regional premiere of “Bastovan,” in which he plays the lead role. The festival is bringing together other names from the film world these days as well, and organizers say Van Damme’s appearance on the red carpet of the Summer Stage will be one of the central moments of the whole program.

Mitrovic also announced that talks are underway for Van Damme to shoot the final film of his career in Serbia, produced by Pink Media Group. Should the deal go through, Belgrade could become part of the film history of one of action cinema’s best known stars, an actor whose roles from the nineties are still recognized by audiences around the world. For now there is no official date or project title, and neither Mitrovic nor Van Damme have said anything further about the details of a possible collaboration.

Our outlet previously reported that Mitrovic had landed in Sardinia to pick up the actor and announced they would arrive in Serbia the following day. That announcement held up, and the tavern video shows the group carried the celebration into Belgrade as well, this time around a Serbian table instead of on an Italian island.

Van Damme’s arrival is already drawing attention from action film fans, who are watching his appearance in Belgrade as a preview of what awaits him in Nis. There, besides the “Bastovan” premiere, he will walk the red carpet of the Summer Stage, where, according to festival organizers, he will appear before the audience as one of the biggest guests in the event’s history. Alongside the “Bastovan” premiere, the six day program in Nis also brings other domestic and foreign titles, screenings of film classics, and meetings between the audience and actors and filmmakers, so Van Damme’s appearance will be just one part, if the most watched one, of a broader lineup.

Until then, the video from the Belgrade tavern stands as the freshest proof that the famous actor, despite the exhausting trip from Sardinia, arrived in good spirits for a night out. Whether Belgrade will win him over enough to leave a mark on his next film is something we will learn in the coming weeks, while talks about the production continue.