Bitorajac and Lucev deny threats ahead of Fest opening
Two Croatian actors from the film “Zlatni rez 42” say no one threatened them, while colleague Irfan Mensur believes some were and expects two or three actors on the carpet.
The red carpet outside Sava Centre will be rolled out on October 2, and for now the number of actors who will walk it is being estimated from messages and group chats. Irfan Mensur, one of the cast of “Zlatni rez 42 (Djeca Kozare)”, worked out his own count for Danas:
“There won’t be an empty carpet. I know one actress and I know one actor who will definitely come. So the carpet will be filled with two to three actors”
Mensur himself will not be among them: he has professional commitments at the time of the premiere and cannot attend. His arithmetic lands in the middle of a story we opened ourselves. We reported earlier that Croatian actors, among them Rene Bitorajac, Milivoj Beader and Vilim Matula, would skip the premiere because far-right extremists had threatened them, and that their Serbian colleagues would join them out of solidarity. Two of those three named actors now say no one threatened them.
What do the actors who deny the threats say?
Rene Bitorajac rejected both claims for Danas, the one about threats and the one about solidarity from Serbian colleagues:
“It is completely untrue that anyone threatened me, and that Serbian actors will show solidarity with us for some reason! I think Serbian actors are ‘pumping it up’, and Croatian ones do not want to take part in the political propaganda the film will obviously be used for, judging by many of the announcements”
Bitorajac does not say in that statement whether he will attend the opening himself.
Leon Lucev answered in a similar vein, but with an explanation of why he will not be there. There were no threats, he says, and the reason for his absence is professional:
“Nobody threatened me. The reason I won’t be coming is earlier commitments on a European project I am doing with the Ivan pl. Zajc National Theatre in Rijeka. I haven’t seen the film, but I believe it is good. And that it should be shown in Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia… The theme of the film, in my view, speaks to our times and to all the people who have replaced humanity with ideology”
Lucev also added that he stands with the part of the local film community that is skipping Fest this year:
“I stand in solidarity with the film community in Serbia that is boycotting Fest at this moment”
So a man who has not seen the film and is staying away because of work in Rijeka still sides with those boycotting the festival, a combination that is hard to reduce to a single reason.
What does Mensur say, and where do the statements diverge?
Mensur disagrees with them: he believes some of his Croatian colleagues were threatened. He told Danas:
“It is true that Croatian actors will not come to the premiere of the film ‘Zlatni rez 42 (Djeca Kozare)’ because of threats from ultra-right activists, and that their colleagues from Serbia will show solidarity with them”
The same colleagues, he added, gave superb performances in the film, and he stands with them because, as he puts it, he knows everything that is happening to them.
The gap between the two sides is narrower than it first looks. Danas reports that after the trailer was released, numerous insulting comments appeared on social media, especially aimed at Bitorajac and Lucev, who were told, among other things, that they should renounce their Croatian citizenship because of the role. The paper also writes that it has seen correspondence mentioning death threats and phone calls to a theatre. The insulting comments, then, are not in dispute. What is disputed is whether anyone threatened these two actors specifically. Mensur, unlike them, is not speaking about himself but about colleagues.
A film to open the festival after a break
Lordan Zafranovic’s “Zlatni rez 42 (Djeca Kozare)” is set to open the 53rd FEST in a gala screening, as the festival returns after a two-and-a-half-year pause. The screenplay was written in 1986 by Arsen Diklic and Zafranovic himself, and the film deals with the suffering of children in the Second World War. Besides Lucev and Bitorajac, the leads are Milan Maric, Milivoj Beader and Aleksej Bjelogrlic, so the cast comes from Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Mensur dismissed the idea that state support for the film could be the reason actors are staying away. By his account, the film was made when producers and funding came together, not at any particular political moment. For now, the number of actors on the carpet rests on what Mensur has heard.
