The secret of the film, about which nothing was known until now

At the first moment, the news that the film Wyznanie by the Czech director Vaclav Marhoul will be premiered at the International Film Festival in Warsaw (October 9-18) went completely unnoticed.

Vaclav Marhoul is a famous Czech director who entered cinematography as an actor and then after a long period started directing in order to hone his poetics completely in a very ambitious and nightmarish war film. A colored bird, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2019, and we find it particularly interesting that it won the award for directing at the 48th edition of FEST in 2020.

It is already in To the colored bird got the opportunity to collaborate with some Hollywood actors, so it was not entirely surprising that he soon attracted the attention of Hollywood and for some time announced a project about Senator McCarthy and anti-communist hysteria with Michael Shannon in the lead role.

SECRET PROJECT

And then, last year, Vaclav Marhoul went to America and in the Los Angeles studios, which is a real rarity for American directors because California has become expensive for filming, he recorded his American debut.

The film was filmed under a veil of secrecy, so that in December of last year, the Czech media announced that Marhoul had filmed his secret project in America, that it was produced by Dallas Sonnier, a well-known independent producer whose films premiered at major festivals, but also a professional who, for the past six years, has turned to creating content for right-wing streaming services, and that the main roles are played by Rob Lowe and Jennifer Jason Leigh.

It was also reported that the film was made by an elite crew consisting of Australian cinematographer Peter Menzies, behind such big-budget titles as Die manly with a vengeance. or Lara Croft: Tomb robber or the experienced French scenographer Vincent Raynaud, among other people who do not deal with hidden underground projects.

The only thing that was known about the plot was that the film would be mainly dialogic, and then Marhoul himself announced in a podcast that the film takes place in a prison.

SECRET REVEALED

Now, however, we know what the film is about. Confession talks about 1938 and the Stalinist persecutions. In Moscow's Lubyanka prison, an NKVD interrogator interrogates his former professor, who has lost faith in the system and wants to protect his loved ones with his testimony. At first glance, nothing strange, and above all there is no element that would require so much mystery. Until we see who the screenwriter is.

The screenplay was written by Ben Shapiro, the superstar of the American right-wing public. This forty-two-year-old lawyer has achieved enormous success as a polemicist, political commentator, podcaster and publicist. In the past decade, he has established himself as one of the most influential voices of the American right, and as a co-founder of the Daily Wire website, he participated in its growth to the status of a media empire that today is able to produce both documentaries and feature films.

Shapiro's views are polarizing, especially those regarding conservative views on family life and support for Israel. And within the American MAGA scene itself, Shapiro clashed with figures such as Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson.

Through numerous clips on social networks, his reputation has reached Serbia, where he is not a completely unknown name among younger fans and connoisseurs of American politics.

E, MY SERBIAN, YOU DID EVERYTHING FIRST

Shapiro is not the only right-wing polemicist who has authored a film this year - and Miloslav Samardžić from the magazine "Pogledi" filmed Đeneral about Draža Mihailović, as his second film after Surrounded about Kalabić.

Today, the Daily Wire website has 770.000 subscribers, in a country of three hundred million inhabitants, and for the sake of comparison - "Pogledi" - despite its humble beginnings as a student paper of the University of Kragujevac, started in 1988 with affirmative articles on multi-partyism, from 1989 with a favorable presentation of Draža Mihailović, and in June 1990 this paper had a circulation of 200.000 copies.

"Pogledi" published articles that were taboo until then, and some, like the first interview of the pretender to the throne, Aleksandar Karađorđević, were extremely exclusive. Over time, of course, the entire media scene began to liberalize, the Serbian Renewal Movement and the Serbian Radical Party, as Chetnik-oriented organizations, launched their magazines and publishing projects "Srpska reč" and "Velika Srbija", so "Pogledi" slowly lost its exclusivity.

Miloslav Samardžić, however, remained very present as a public figure and represented his findings on the history of the Second World War in our country in various media and established himself as a very active polemicist. While right-wing content in America was pushed from the mainstream media to the margins, which helped the rise of the Daily Wire, the reverse process happened in our country, which led to the stagnation of "Pogled".

THE CULTURE WAR BEGAN IN KRAGUJEVAC

Miloslav Samardžić, unlike his competition on the Serbian right-wing editorial scene, had a comprehensive approach and understood that the battles for his view of the Second World War would not be waged only through articles about the events but also through a "culture war", so that in the early nineties "Views" gathered numerous young film critics, then students of the Faculty of Dramatic Arts, in an attempt to cover the field of reflection on art.

Many today's very famous artists and public workers published in "Pogledi", some of them with texts that were quite extreme and cannot be connected in any way with their current views. However, the fall of "Pogled" did not lead to a creative mobilization of this critical school around the idea of ​​a Chetnik film.

The Daily Wire has used its rise not only to write about popular culture and film, but to become first a streaming service six years ago, and now a producer of original film content that is in line with their worldviews. Hand on heart, Daily Wire did have a lot of experience with video production because one of their most watched content was Ben Shapiro's show.

However, Daily Wire's entry into the world of film production and distribution was more inevitable than that - one of the founders of this company, Jeremy Boring, started as a film producer and director, and his only feature-length work is about a political topic - illegal migration from Mexico.

As an editor, Miloslav Samardžić pioneered, through his critics, first theoretically postulated the poetics of Serbian right-wing cinema, but it did not materialize in that attempt, although his collaborators at the time mostly did.

However, already in the 1990s, Samardžić had a vision of starting a television channel and making films, so he said about it for NIN: "Of course, after the start of television, we would think about making films. We were provoked by the fact that, as soon as the war broke out, Deserter, followed by a number of other defeatist films. We would work in imitation of Western countries: when there is a war, films are made about heroes. Funding for dramas for our budget at the time was a cakewalk".

In the same text, Samardžić mentions his part-time film critics at the time as authors who would do that.

Boring, on the other hand, managed to recruit the aforementioned Hollywood producer Dallas Sonier and the former director of the blockbuster Spielberg production DJ Caruso for the first Daily Wire production, so that he would not have to direct himself. Miloslav, on the other hand, had to go the other way - a small number of his protégés among the drama artists remained on the line of "Pogled" - and those who are are certainly outside the pay grade of his current production, therefore he took to direct it himself.

Boring and Sonia solve this by hiring actors who were "cancelled" because of their views - say when Gina Carano was fired from the series Mandalorian for comparing the persecution of Trump sympathizers to the Holocaust, she immediately received a film deal with the Daily Wire. In the new action film of Daily Wire, an important role is played by the "cancelled" Marvel actor Jonathan Majors, who after accusations of domestic violence lost all his jobs and his entire promising career fell into pieces.

The recipe of attracting degraded stars was also taken over by other producers of radical right-wing content, so Uwe Ball hired Armi Hemer, accused of various sexual perversions, for his controversial film (see "Vreme" No. 1856/57).

The closest the Daily Wire came to mainstream success was through the documentaries of their journalist Matt Walsh, who in the confrontational manner of Michael Moore deals with the topic of gender in his first and racism in his second. As Moore was practically retired, Walsh remained his successful copy, only with a different ideological sign. After the extraordinary success of the first film on streaming, the second came out in US theaters and earned a full $12 million, making it the most watched documentary of 2024. However, despite record ratings, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences ignored him in the Oscar race.

A STEP AHEAD

However, hiring Vaclav Marhoul is now going to a new level. Namely, he is a respected European art film director with whom Daily Wire greatly expands the field of struggle. Now they don't want to make movies like "Wolf Hollywood doesn't make anymore", "movies for normal patriarchal Americans who just want to have fun" and the like. They want to break into the domain of film, which has a certain prestige. The Daily Wire bought the rights to Ayn ​​Rand's book a year ago Atlas Shrugged and he wanted to adapt it as a mini-series. He still hasn't done that, but he has produced a series Pendragon: The Rise of Merlin based on the series of fantasy novels by Steven Lawhead, which have worldwide fame, as evidenced by the fact that they were also published in our country. On Amazon streaming, the series has achieved considerable success and has been promoted as Christian Game of Thrones.

In some things, Samardzic was not the first because he did not have the conditions to fulfill his ideas, but now in distant Nashville we still see that his pioneering ideas survived at the highest level through the Daily Wire. Shapiro and his collaborators want to prove themselves in high culture after popular entertainment and agitation. They wisely recognized the human resource for this in Central and Eastern Europe, where anti-communism shows strong signs of life, and is additionally galvanized by the war in Ukraine and the Cold War sentiment that stems from it.

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