Vlada Divljan Documentary Opens Rokumentarni Dani Festival

A box of videotapes sat in a closet for ten years before anyone opened it. When Vlada Divljan’s family finally looked at what was inside, they found a man the public had never met: the one behind the stage, behind the interviews, behind the image that music history had long since turned into legend. Director Marko Djordjevic built the film Behind the Smile out of that footage, and it is the opening film of the eighth Rokumentarni Dani Music Documentary Film Review, screening Thursday, September 17, at Podgorica’s Kruzni Tok cultural center.

The film promises no revelation and no scandal. It offers only what a home recording always carries: a raw, unfinished view of someone who, in front of a camera, was used to being polished. Ten years is enough time for a legend to settle, so Behind the Smile is less an attempt to challenge that legend than to loosen it a little.

Rokumentarni Dani was launched in 2017 in Niksic, built on the idea of preserving stories from domestic, regional and world popular culture through documentary film, music and meetings with the filmmakers themselves. Over seven previous editions the festival has shown 78 films from 18 countries, staged 15 concerts and more than 30 side events, and expanded from Niksic to Podgorica, Mojkovac and Kotor. The eighth edition, running September 17 through 20, carries the slogan Written by Youth and brings ten film screenings, four concerts, talks, a panel discussion and a Videodrom segment featuring a selection of Montenegrin music videos. This year’s edition is backed by the Secretariat for Culture of the Capital City of Podgorica, which in this case means financial and institutional support rather than an organizing role: the festival is still run by the people behind Kruzni Tok and the Rokumentarni Dani team.

The festival’s youth theme is not read as a matter of age but as a kind of cultural energy that, across the former Yugoslavia, repeatedly turned rock and pop culture into a language of resistance and connection that ran past the borders politics tried to draw. That is why The Dreamers, Vladimir Petrovic’s film about one of the world’s first all female rock bands, founded in Belgrade in the 1960s by four teenage girls, plays less like a nostalgic add on to the program than a natural companion to the Divljan film: both stories are about a moment when music was the only space of freedom available to someone.

Among the domestic productions, two stand out: Randominacija, Emilijan Dimitrijevic’s short film about Marko Lubarda Random and his relationship with music, money and pressure away from the spotlight, and Born with a Flaw, Sead Sabotic’s account of the Niksic band Osma Sila, its formation, its long hiatus and the album that took decades to finally come out. Alongside them is Frank Dujmic’s Funk Yu, a Croatian Montenegrin coproduction about a vinyl collector chasing the one release still missing from his set, and Behind the Scene, Made in NY Jazz Fest 2025, a look behind the curtain of a Montenegrin festival. The regional lineup adds Silvio Mirosnicenko’s Grandpa Guru, a portrait of the band Kultur Shock and frontman Srdjan Djin Jevdjevic split between Sarajevo and Seattle; Slobodan Maksimovic’s Praslovan, tracing Zoran Predin’s path from the group Lacni Franz to his solo career; Ante Storic’s Vlajternativa itd., about the alternative festival in Benkovac; and Ines Pletikos’s In the Name of the Father, Petar, the story of Istrian singer songwriter Franci Blaskovic told through his daughter’s eyes.

Every festival day closes with a concert. Domestic acts Mucin and Janjo & Yataguns are joined by Short Reports from Serbia, and the festival closes on Sunday with Sara Renar from Croatia, who also leads a Loop + Sample workshop that day. Mucin is using the festival to promote new material just released on vinyl, while the Written by Youth panel discussion looks at the place of young people in music and film production. Running alongside it all is the Full House fair, with handmade crafts and a market for records and comics. The lineup, which puts a film about an artist who is no longer alive at the opening and young bands and debut acts at the close, is no accident: it lets the festival demonstrate, quite literally, the continuity it talks about, legend at the opening, continuation at the close.

Rokumentarni Dani has long stopped needing to justify itself with attendance numbers. It is one of the few places where the region’s music history gets documented rather than retold, and it does so without the sentimentality a subject like Divljan could easily invite. What makes the festival worth attention is not nostalgia but patience: waiting for a family to open a box, for a band from Niksic to finally see its album released, for a collector to find the one record he was missing. That is the pace at which a real documentary story should be told.