Bunker

The film consists of three basic motives: 1. It is the folk who carried on war with their own hands, started the change from capitalism to socialism and lived on breaking up the earth. The folk live and they are not upset - they never lived in better conditions. They were witnesses as long as the king ruled over the country, and when he fell, fascism marched over the folk. But they fought and survived, even the Russians came and parted again. The folk are the basis out of which author anticipate the right answer to any crisis. 2. Such a film about a war includes also the social status of its participants - into a dialogue of memories with the real life of today. 3. There should be made an end with the cinematographical manipulation of the war subject. The films created in this way are often so privileged, so spectacular and expensive, so strikingly without the participation of the people, that you really lose the conviction that there could ever be made an honest, true and simple film about the Yugoslav war and the Yugoslav revolution.

I made this film in 1972, when situation in Yugoslavia was politically tight after all the shakes in 1968 and 1971, and ‘cleanings’ were praticed in all the aspects of life, especially on film. This film was made as a polemic with this dictate. I went to Jazak at Fruška gora where the local villagers played in front of the camera how they experienced War and Revolution from where the raw material of memory and life was drown out. Film was forbidden as an offence to socialism, but when the protagonists protested, censorship document was annulled with the explanation that it was a ‘mistake’. Želimir Žilnik