Director Damir Markovina dedicated his new film, WE SHALL LIVE TOGETHER which has screened in the Competition Programme – Documentary Film of 32nd Sarajevo Film Festival, to his father, Roko, anti-nationalist at heart – a rare example of someone committed to his ideals.
Roko Markovina was never the kind of person to switch sides whenever the political winds changed. He refused to trade his Communist Party membership for a nationalist identity, and he paid a heavy price for that decision – losing his country, his city, his home, his job, and his political position. During the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, he felt it was his moral duty to stay in Mostar with his family and fight for his vision of justice and coexistence. At the Parliament of Bosnia and Herzegovina, he gave an emotional speech against the Dayton Agreement, saying publicly that one people could not build its happiness on the suffering of the other two. And what did he get in return? He was forced out of his apartment in Mostar, ended up living as a refugee, and faced the resentment of his wife and the incomprehension of his children.
Like your previous films we saw at the Sarajevo Film Festival, Wait for Me and Deserters, this film is also about you and your family. It’s interesting that, at this stage in your life, you’re still so deeply engaged with questions of generations, generational differences, and the conflicts between them. To what extent are your films a journey of self-discovery and a way of confronting yourself? Have they fulfilled that purpose?
That’s a perfectly fair question. Believe me, I would have moved away from making films about my family a long time ago if I didn’t feel such a strong need to explore issues that affect me personally – issues my family has lived through, but which still don’t really have a proper place in the public discourse of the post-Yugoslav societies. I also believe it’s the job of a documentary filmmaker to bear witness to what it means to be alive in our time, in our society – or, in my family’s case, societies – and to show the different kinds of struggles that come with that.
The political and identity traumas caused by the breakup of Yugoslavia changed our lives suddenly, profoundly and irreversibly. They shaped our circumstances, influenced our interests and careers, and deeply affected our personal relationships and family dynamics. Those events continue to shape my life to this day. What I’m trying to do is capture those traumas on film and transform them into an experience of empathy, something that can be shared through cinema, because I don’t believe they belong only to us. There are still so many consequences of the events of the 1990s that the societies that emerged from that period continue to avoid confronting. Of course, I approach these stories from my own perspective, because these are the experiences that shaped my life. I always point the camera toward the things that trouble me most. I may not be able to fully define what that is, but through directing and editing I try to elevate these personal experiences to a more universal level, where my family members stop being just specific individuals and become protagonists in a timeless story – one that reminds us that, for those who suffer it, war is always the same, wherever and whenever it happens. I’m deeply grateful to my family for understanding and supporting my need to tell our story. I hope it helps people who have lived through similar experiences of pain, loss, displacement, and the horrors of war feel that they are not alone. I can’t say exactly how much this process has led to self-discovery, but I do know that I feel more at peace every time I manage to bring another part of that story to a meaningful conclusion.
Maybe it is a search for self-understanding, or maybe it’s simply a need to reclaim control over my own narrative. Ultimately, my films are about what it means for us to be alive today, in this society, carrying everything we’ve survived. To me, that’s both an act of understanding and a political act. And to come back to your question, perhaps this film marks the end of that therapy, at least for a while.
Your father’s speech against the Dayton Peace Agreement, delivered in the Parliament of Bosnia and Herzegovina at the end of 1995, has been unfairly forgotten. The country’s fate might have been very different if more people had shared his views. Unearthing that speech from the archives may not change the course of Bosnian politics today, but it does remind us that alternative perspectives existed – and still exist – beyond the dominant narratives promoted in the media. It’s fortunate that the recording survived at all. Was it difficult to obtain usable footage for the film?
Today, exactly thirty years later, when I listen to my father’s speech from the parliamentary podium in 1995, I can’t help feeling that he turned out to be an astonishingly accurate prophet – despite sincerely hoping he would be wrong, as he says in the speech itself. On the thirtieth anniversary of the Dayton Agreement, Bosnia and Herzegovina looks almost exactly as he predicted it would. It’s a classic Cassandra story.
And, as tragedy would have it, once you refuse to worship the local nationalist gods, you’re punished for it. In his case, the punishment came in the form of oblivion, the loss of the pension he had earned, years of exile, and the constant burden of knowing he had been right all along. His life story became one of the main reasons I began digging through both private and public archives. I was overjoyed when, in 2018, we finally found that speech thanks to the extraordinary efforts of the team at the BHRT Archive Centre, to whom I remain deeply grateful. In the film we use less than three minutes of a speech that originally lasted more than twenty minutes, and it’s just as chillingly accurate in its entirety. That preserved recording became the cornerstone on which the whole film was built. It’s really a miracle that it survived at all, considering the chaos of the war, the difficult post-war years, and the lack of proper archival preservation. The archive of the Parliament of Bosnia and Herzegovina from 1991, which we also managed to locate at BHRT, wasn’t nearly as fortunate. The recordings had been stored on U-matic tapes that barely survived the war. We were only able to digitize fragments of them, and those fragments appear in the film exactly as they were recovered.
All the personal tragedies people endured during the war are, of course, immeasurably more painful than any material loss. But while making this film, what deeply affected me was the loss of my country’s physical memory. I became painfully aware that many of the events that shaped my life now exist only in my own fragile memory. Their analogue, magnetic, or digital record was destroyed forever by that same war.
I vividly remember the unbearable tension during the sessions of the Parliament of Bosnia and Herzegovina between 1990 and 1992. As a young man, I watched them waiting for my father’s next speech or intervention. All the future protagonists of the war were still sitting in the same chamber, talking to one another while the tension kept rising.
It made me realize how important it is to rescue, restore, digitize, and properly catalogue these materials. How many extraordinary and important films are still lying forgotten in archives across the former Yugoslavia?
To me, that’s an essential question, not just for Bosnia and Herzegovina, but for every society that emerged after Yugoslavia’s collapse. How can we build the future if we no longer have a visual or documentary record of our past to stand on? When societies rely only on selective memory, they usually end up creating myths. And it seems to me that myths, especially nationalist ones, have never taken us very far.
It’s hard to imagine your father changing at this stage of his life. He’s stubborn and deeply principled, so insisting that he do the impossible, reconsider decisions from the past that the rest of the family may not agree with, can only have the opposite effect. Although the film could be seen as an attempt to persuade him to compromise his principles, it ultimately feels like a tribute to his integrity and moral consistency. In the end, you clearly express admiration for those qualities. Do you think there’s more of your father in you than you’d perhaps like to admit? I’m thinking of your commitment to a shared cultural space, your advocacy of a common polycentric language, and your resistance to the one-dimensional worldview imposed by dominant nationalisms. Isn’t everything you’ve done in that field – something that’s also reflected in all your films – a natural continuation of what your father stood for?
You could probably attribute it to the way I was raised, to the strong anti-fascist tradition in my family, or simply to the experience of the last war, which left us without a home. But when it comes to the fundamental political and moral questions, my father and I have never really been far apart. Our disagreements are mostly the familiar ones between an authoritarian father and a stubborn son… or two sons. Of course, no amount of arguing is going to change the past. But there’s always the hope that it can change the present.
One of the main reasons I made this film was that every time I returned to my parents’ home, the one I left thirty-two years ago, I felt as though, the moment I walked through the front door, I’d stepped straight back into 1992. Around our kitchen table, time had simply stopped. I would find my father endlessly revisiting the decisions he had made during the war, unable to accept, or even come to terms with, how it had all ended. For years, I watched him living in a kind of self-imposed exile, trapped in an endless loop, like the silver ball in a pinball machine stuck in tilt.
Our disagreements were never really about politics. They were about idealism, about naivety, and, above all, about time – about which moment in history you choose to live in. For me, that moment has always been the present. For years my father refused to have anything to do with Mostar, the city that drove him into exile in 1993. Now, on the eve of this film’s premiere, he has finally gone back and lives there once again. For me, that’s the single most important outcome of this entire filmmaking process. I’d like to believe the film helped him take that enormous step and finally close the circle of his exile.
And beyond our own story, I think there’s something universal in the relationship between fathers and sons. I believe it’s essential that my generation, every generation, regardless of which side of history they come from, asks their parents, the generation on whose watch the war happened, one simple question: Why? What did you do during the war, Dad?
It’s often easiest to direct our anger at the people closest to us. Shouldn’t your frustration really be aimed at the majority who thought differently, rather than at your father, who, in extraordinarily difficult circumstances, simply did what he believed was right?
I don’t think very highly of the political judgment of the majority, and I’m not angry, certainly not with my father. His personal frustration comes precisely from the fact that, by the will of the majority, nationalism hollowed out the political ideals of equality and social justice from within, stripping them of much of what they had built.
That’s where my father and I differ politically. I happen to agree with Mark Twain, who said that whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it’s time to pause and seriously reflect on your choices.
What I really want to point to, something we’ve allowed ourselves to forget with astonishing ease, is opportunism. Tens of thousands of people, driven by conformity or personal ambition, changed their political principles and party affiliation literally overnight. In doing so, they abandoned the very ideas of the society they had once claimed, using one of post-war socialism’s favourite expressions, to be “building.” Then they stood by in silence as we slid into years of barbarity, slaughter, arson, and looting, simply to preserve their own privileges and comfortable lives. Let’s not fool ourselves: they are the true winners of all our wars. And the price paid by everyone who refused to follow their path has been devastating.
The original idea behind this film was to explore the consequences of a moral choice made by one principled man. I wanted to know how that man would look back on his decision thirty years later, after witnessing the triumph of opportunism for so long, and whether he would make the same choice again. My father still stands by that decision without compromise. All I can feel is profound respect for the strength of his convictions.
