The life and death of Srđan Aleksić

We are in Belgrade for a short time this time, just for the movie. Melina and Srdjan, screenwriters Circles, they are keeping our tickets, but there is a crowd around the premiere, we can't meet in peace, but at noon we go to the Trade Union House, Hall 2, for a press conference. The two of them will be there, we'll take the tickets, and we'll run away to the Belgrade Kosava, adapted to tourists and their tourist needs. That's how it was intended, but in the end, word by word, step by step down the steps of the amphitheater, and here we are in the front row, sitting and waiting for the start of the press conference. I didn't want that, I won't write about the film, that's not why I came to Belgrade, I'd like everything to remain very private, because Circles anyway, write everywhere, including in Croatia, where the film will be measured according to some local standards, the way films from the Region are regularly measured, as Yugoslavia is politely and aseptically called today. I would not like to be, not even a footnote, in that futile and persistent effort to convince himself and his local audience that all those Serbian and Bosnian films are not really something, but Europeans love them for their Balkan exoticism. I wouldn't, given the assumed topic Circles.

And to make things more awkward, on that only day of our stay in Belgrade, we must first listen to the press conference of the film crew. Cannibal vegetarian. Director Branko Schmidt says: "I am certainly the fiercest critic of Croatian society today." It lasts more than half an hour, and then it's the crew's turn Circles. There are many of them, it will take a long time. I am afraid that I will hear something that would not be good for me to hear. Namely, all those present watched the film at the press screening, so they are asking questions accordingly. I hope no one tells the end. Although I believe that, unfortunately, we know very well how everything ended in Srđan Aleksić's life.

At one point, Nikola Rakočević speaks, an actor who suddenly took off and marked the last few years of Serbian cinematography, with a child's face, minimalist, yet powerful expression. He tells the story of how he was eight years old when the war started, and that he wrote letters to his father on the battlefield. That's how he participated in everything, without anyone asking him anything. Against his will, he became part of a terrible story, and he tried to resolve this feeling by working on Circles. He speaks simply and very cleverly, perfectly unpathetically. This is characteristic of the people who were on stage in Hall 2 at this press conference. From the director Srdan Golubović and the screenwriter, to each of the actors, people speak as if their every word will be forever remembered and written on a card in some emotional and spiritual file. And it's as if no one ever enters the first person plural, into some social, social or political collectivity, no one turns Srđan Aleksić into some collectivist metaphor or just mentions Serbian society, which, well, is ripe for this kind of film... Of course, all it would be a lie, including the worst one, if a society was ripe for something. The only thing that cannot be a lie is speaking from the singular and from one's own experience. Perhaps only people with their first and last names have matured. So did eight-year-old Nikola who wrote to his father on the battlefield...

We headed towards the Sava center early, by taxi from Topličina venc, already around six. The movie starts at seven, but you should always be careful when crossing Belgrade's bridges. It is a city divided like Beirut, like Jerusalem, like Mostar, but only by a sudden traffic jam. But maybe that crowd is also a metaphor for something deeper, which divides Belgrade into two mutually alien parts, one from which you would run to the end of the world, and the other that won't let you leave Belgrade, even after you are in reality, or in your own head , fled to the end of the world. I know smart and good people, from cobblers to writers and painters, who say that after the war they no longer went to Belgrade, nor do they intend to go, and at the same time they sound like someone talking about a lost eye. It all started in Belgrade, tanks moved across these bridges in 1991 - well, not exactly across the Branko bridge - and this is repeated, long and muffled, as if twenty-two years later, their roar is still heard. Something would have to happen, the passage of time alone is not enough for people who used to come here to hear something different. Only then, and not with the construction of the ring road, would Belgrade cease to be a divided city. I think about what should happen, and nothing really comes to mind, because everything is just a filmic, literary or private fantasy. Evil is irreparable, because the good for which someone loses his head to other people means nothing... The meaning of sacrifice in ancient tragedy and in the Holy Scriptures, and probably in all the holy beginnings of humanity, is contained in the redemption of those who were given life. Jesus, they say, died and rose again for all of us, equally... But for that to be true, one would have to believe that his sacrifice meant something to the community.

In the Sava Center, everything is like at Fest 1986, which I attended after returning from the army. Big, spacious, ambitious architecture for a vanished state. One of the wisest things that Ataturk did when he reduced the Ottomans to the Turks was to make Ankara the capital. Belgrade, like Vienna, has the problem that even today, with its architecture and space layout, internal symbolism and memory, it is the capital of another country. And it will stay that way forever. At least as long as the Sava Center or the Federal Executive Council building, while those boulevards are too wide for the standards that have shrunk in the meantime, and anyway too narrow for all that traffic. But what would be the Serbian Ankara?

Almost four thousand people are arranged and accommodated in the cinema hall. How many can it fit? The vast majority, like me, do not know what to expect. Perhaps they think that they have come to some kind of film commemoration of a war hero, such as existed, and still exist, in our cultural traditions? Maybe they think they are coming to pay homage to Srdjan Aleksic, and that will be it? Some of them certainly think and feel that way, which is good and noble. I know they are wrong, I am calm about it, because of Melina Pota Koljević and Srđan Koljević, they would not have told such a story in their script, and Srdan Golubović, I know, would not have recorded it. If it was a commemoration, even Nikola Rakočević would not have thought about letters to his father on the battlefield.

I recognize many of these people around me. Some I know from television and newspapers, others I know personally, from Belgrade, but some faces I see now just before final oblivion. They emerge from a very distant, pre-war Sarajevo and Belgrade past, so it seems to me that I wouldn't even recognize them if I saw them in a few days or months. But the thousands of completely unknown, even invisible visitors to the premiere, whose faces I don't even see, but only their coats, arms sticking out of their sleeves, legs, evening toilets, look the way the festival audience looked to me twenty-seven years ago, I guess. At the time, however, I did not think about who these people were, individually. Now I am interested in their private biographies, who thought what, where he was and what he did, at the time when Srđan Aleksić, in the Trebinje market, probably the most beautiful market I have ever seen, exchanged his own fate for the fate of Alen Glavović. It was written for him to die before Srđan's eyes - and to fall on his soul - and it was written for Srđan to live. At that time, how many people from this audience would have been in Srđan's place, how many would have been in Alen's place, and how many would have been in the place of the murderers? It would be very bad if there were no third parties among the four thousand people in the hall, although it is clear that the vast majority of those present would just stand on the sidelines and do nothing. This is the case in the Sava Center and in Belgrade, but also in every other city in the world, in Stockholm, Rome or Nairobi. Except that it doesn't mean anything, because Stockholm, Rome and Nairobi don't have the problem we have, waiting for someone to atone for all our sins, soothe our consciences, and make time run again after it was stopped in 1991.

Circles are a film that, in the name of the memory of Srđan Aleksić, deals with the repayment of debts, and issues of guilt and revenge. A young man whose life was saved in 1993, the way it was saved for the real Alen Glavović, risks everything, including his family, his wife and two daughters, for another woman and her child. He has his reason - great and unfathomable - to exchange his fate and the fate of his relatives for the fate of that woman and child. For him, this becomes a condition of human existence. It's not courage, it's not even honesty, it's simply not possible otherwise.

The murderer's son comes to the murdered man's father, who is building a small votive church for his son. He comes as a hired worker, and not knowing who he is going to. He stays, after the man contemptuously rejects him, because he thinks that it is not fair. But then something happens that is the foundation and backbone of this film, which elevates the story of redemption, but also the story of fathers and sons, to the very meaning of ancient tragedy and catharsis. It is not good to mention ancient tragedy, it is worn out from constant wear and tear, but there is no better term. And everything is, suddenly, so local and so direct, told to the end, yet protected from all sides from any political or collectivist connotation. Srdan, telling Melina's and Srđan's story, managed - in an incredible and unattainable way - to bring everyone present in front of him as a person with his own destiny, and not regardless of which group and audience.

In the Belgrade hospital, a friend of the murdered man, a famous surgeon, has one of the killers in front of him. He is the only one who can operate on him, he is the only one who can give or take away his life. What he asks from the patient is only remorse, remorse, some emotion. The patient answers him with the cynicism of the collective, the cynicism of our nations and nationalities and their national policies, he answers him with Serbian cynicism, by telling him that it was all one big coincidence, in which the murdered man got involved like some fool.

And then, was Srđan Aleksić just a fool? The father in the film wonders what sense there is in the sacrifice of his son, if this ultimate human good actually means nothing to others. No, he is not thinking about the young man whom his son protected, he is a good and upright man, but he is thinking about the people he lives among, maybe the Serbs, and maybe all the others who shared all their wars with the Serbs as brothers. What sense does the sacrifice of Jesus Christ have for all people, if his sacrifice simply does not concern those people? Or if they are unable to metaphorize and recognize it in the small and large sacrifices of other people.

The example of Srđan Aleksić is big and bright. But, that is for sure, he is not the only one, nor is he unique in the wars of the nineties. There were those who sacrificed themselves for others, both among Serbs, among Croats, and among Bosniaks. With the Serbs, probably the most, because they were the most numerous in that war, but also the most aggressive for a long time. I don't mean only those who, like the Srdjan, gave their lives for others, but also all those who gave less than their lives, or who, at least, were ready to live under the contempt of the majority of their own people. But such people are not talked about, they are hidden and do not exist, because no one knows what to do with them and what they have done. Their sacrifice is not necessary for the majority, their conscience does not bother them, they have no need for redemption, they think of them as fools who disrupted the logic of the Yugoslav war as one big accident, one collective traffic accident, in which over a hundred thousand people died in an instant. Srđan Aleksić was not hidden and sidelined only for one reason: his father Rade Aleksić, who will be applauded for a long time by four thousand people in the Sava center, he built, for himself, out of sadness and out of the need to find himself in his son's moral decision. a reason for further life, that memory of Srdjan, which will then grow into something else. But not in the Serbian myth, in the medal that will be presented to the father by the President of the Republika Srpska Milorad Dodik. But not in the civic and pacifist myth, in the streets that are named after Srđan Aleksić in several cities. Thanks to the memory of Radet Aleksić, built like a memorial church on top of a hill, this film about catharsis and redemption was created.

Photo: M. Milenković

Circles it will not unite Belgrade, nor will it make Serbia a better country. Even the people who left the premiere, petrified and shaken, will not get better. Nothing will change either after the recent premiere in Trebinje, or after the film goes through Sarajevo, Pula and Zagreb in the summer and autumn. It would not change even if, by some miracle, all twenty-four million people (are there that many of us already?), ex-Yugoslavs, today Regionals, saw Circles. We know what the defense mechanisms are in every human being against Evil, how to survive wars, and the horrors of war, and concentration camps, all our Jasenovci, jadovna and dretelji, all our lackeys, Omarska and Trnopolje, but they are always bigger and stronger defensive mechanisms in front of Good, in front of that Good that could direct us to be contrite and responsible, or, as Milan Milišić wrote in his prophetic poem: "Let us no longer be one, but the other." Let's bend the knee, let's say verses for reconciliation." And so, defending ourselves from not being one, but from being other, better and more responsible towards our personal human destinies, we will easily refuse to understand what is happening in a movie.

However, Circles are important for something else: apart from the fact that they served their authors and protagonists as some kind of incredible self-therapy - that is what Nikola Rakočević speaks about so accurately and well - apart from the fact that, by creating an excellent film and making the story serious to the point of fate and tragedy, they did something important for Srđan Aleksić, but also for all our societies and our cultures, they provided man with a small and solid foothold in this Balkan and Yugoslav universe, something on which to to rely on when it seems to him that he is nowhere as soon as he is where he is, and that there is nothing to explain or explain to anyone here. Such strongholds place us within a certain culture and its language, and they constitute our better and nobler affiliations and affiliations. Finally, apart from Alen Glavović and his life, there is at least one other sure reason and confirmation that Srđan Aleksić's sacrifice made sense in this world. And with it the victims of all the forgotten, unknown heroes, whose moral decision missed both this war and their compatriots, but hit the meaning of human civilization, the meaning of God, present or absent.

At the exit from the Sava Center, we passed a few steps from Rade Aleksić. I didn't approach him, why should I bother an unknown and uninvited man, when, in fact, I don't even know what to say to him. The taxi arrived quickly, the taxi driver was quiet, he didn't speak, but let us talk about the movie. And we only talked about the actors, about the incredible Aleksandar Berček - God, what was going through his head while he was shooting the film and listening to the story of Srdjan Aleksić?, we talked about Nikola Rakočević, who on his back and on his face presented the heaviest burden of the story, about Leon Lučev and Hristina Popović, and Vuk Kostić, in the small and risky role of the hero, about Nebojša Glogovac and the monstrous Boris Isaković, about the great Danish Sandžaklija Dejan Čukić, we talked about everything, just not to talk about the subject in front of the taxi driver Circles.

Tomorrow is Sunday, and we are returning to Zagreb, on the highway of brotherhood and unity. It's hot and humid in Belgrade, and it will be like that all the way to Jasenovac. Right from that place, it's as if we are in a movie scene, all the meadows are covered with snow, it's foggy and cold. There is no symbolism in that either, just meteorology, geography, history. Scattered life, which is sometimes so powerfully collected in a film.