I had the privilege to speak with Zulfikar Filandra, a young director who is a third year student at the Academy of Performing Arts, Department of Directing. I interviewed Zulfikar in December 2013 soon after the premiere of his play ‘The Wall’ on the stage of Sarajevo’s SARTR theatre, which is based on the dramatization of Jean-Paul Sartre’s short story of the same title.
By: Medina Malagić
You have a BA in Business Studies and now you attend the Academy of Performing Arts in Sarajevo. What led you towards that path?
The Academy holds entrance exams every two years. The year I finished high school (2008.) there was no entrance exam, but at the time I didn’t envision myself in theatre or film. So what to do? Back in high school, I didn’t know what I would do when I grow up. I was a good student. I was thinking of maybe studying medicine. Then I thought to myself that I would do some writing in my life since I had an interest in literature. I became more involved in it and said to myself, this is great. But, the Faculty of Philosophy here is really terrible, so if you want to be a writer there is no point of going there because you will not learn anything. There was this collaboration course starting at the University, a collaboration Bachelor between our School of Economics and Business and Griffith College in Dublin, Ireland, so that looked like the best possible option to study then. You do two years in Sarajevo and then go to Dublin for a year to graduate and get your degree. After my first year of study, I decided to take the entrance exam at the Academy of Performing Arts, just out of curiosity. I was very relaxed and didn’t prepare for it and wanted to try it, to see if I was capable. This entrance exam is a very mystified thing and it’s infamously difficult to get into our Academy, and it is one of the reasons there are very few students attending it, sadly.
I got accepted and ended up being the first on the list of candidates. The exam goes on for five days, where they, the jury, try to break your head literally, to see whether you will want to do directing or if you are just a dilettante. In the second round, they give you a camera to make a short film. I had never actually done that so everything was new for me. But I was very relaxed and had no expectations of passing the exam. I think this is the reason I passed and I advise others to do the same. You just have to be yourself. If they see talent, it’s there. You can’t really prepare for this. I was 19, and I was surprised and in shock when I got in. But I said “No” to the Academy and continued my studies in Economics. During my second year of studies I realized that Business isn’t the right field for me. But I went to Dublin eventually, and fortunately, because up there I managed to break up with certain delusions I had, delusions that are common for anyone living here.
What delusions are these?
It is the idea that something will happen. Something will come on its own. I think most people in this city are waiting for things, because we do not have a culture of being proactive. It’s a cultural thing.
So I had two delusions-that something will happen and that somewhere else is better than here, that everything will be solved just by going somewhere else. When I got to Dublin, I realized that if you are depressed here, you are depressed anywhere else. I was with a group of Bosnian people while in Ireland, but I wanted to see the real Dublin and Ireland on my own.
And the thing is, what I found is that in Western Europe, if you want to do something like art, regardless of how talented you are, you don’t have to worry about your existence. In this city and in this country, I was told that you couldn’t be in this field. You’ll end up not being able to even pay for your coffee.
So here you are not supposed to have these aspirations?
It’s not that you are not supposed to, but like it would be impossible to maintain your existence doing these things. If you are somewhere else you can be engaged in this field and still be able to survive. It would not matter how talented you are, you could at least work in some state institution for film or theatre. We don’t have these institutions. Here, the situation is different; you can survive and work only if you are one of the few best ones. Sarajevo has only four theatres. It is ridiculous that in the Academy’s Directing Department, the number of people who graduate and end up doing something in our art is very low.
So do you see a future for yourself here with what you are doing now?
Of course. I am against this idea, that the “end is nigh”. I think you’re now able to see and feel, that underneath, things are crumbling down very fast here, from the inside. I am very worried, but I think that this time, something is about to change, but maybe even for the worse.
When a void is left, and you don’t know what to fill that void with, it can go in either a good or bad direction. Maybe its necessary to get to that point before something can change?
That is the idea of let’s hit the bottom and then go up. I don’t know. The bottom is endless. The void has been here since 1995. And since 1995 our age has been devoid of certain things. Particularly because of this reason – that things are about to crumble down, I cannot tolerate any negativity, pessimism, fatalism and defeatism.
My idea is that this is the most important city in Europe in the 21st century for culture. Regarding Europe, I don’t think any history anymore is about to happen in London or Paris. These places reach their noble status, and then they remain still, and are there for us to admire and enjoy. But there is no art there. All these places are established. The ideology of cultural capitalism that is ruining everything has overrun these parts. I am very sure that our position here is in fact amazing. Our horrible experience helped to clarify a few things, actually. Like, what is the point of making art? During the siege of Sarajevo, the art scene went nuts with production. A short film made by Johan van der Keuken during the siege shows Haris Pašović saying that we can live without fine wine, cigars, but we cannot live without culture. So several of these questions, like what is the point of continuing, where we had the end of the world here in a way, clarified a few things and gave us a certain position over these boring French, European, Western, hipster wannabes, the impotent filmmakers, with their boring art cinema that is a pretentious pornography of a different kind.
I feel that these artists out there in the West have to make up their existential ennui problems, while we here are surrounded with real problems.
In Florence, for example, it is a place where history happened and will not happen again. By history I mean an historical Event. In Florence, I don’t feel any urge to write a line of poetry. It is an enjoyable place, like paradise. But you don’t feel this tension. Tension that’s inspiring, Belfast style tension. When I was in Belfast, it felt like Mostar, like how it was in Mostar some time ago. There is this Institute in Belfast that addresses the issues of ethnic hate and I met people there who work with children. There, the proposed solution for hate was to have mixed kindergartens. The degree of separation in Belfast even today is ridiculous. I met some people in Dublin who told me they were never in Loyalist areas of Belfast, who said they couldn’t go there because their accent will be noticed. So, in respect, the question that arises for us here is, how do we treat our experience? We have to be optimistic; nevertheless it’s considered crazy to be optimistic here.
So what is your experience here like? You mentioned you don’t tolerate negativity any longer, in a place where it is considered crazy to be hopeful and optimistic.
When I meet people older than me, they tell me that they had the same ideas as I have now, and they gave up on these ideas in the end. But I will continue to work. I want to work with others like me in the city. From what I see, nothing will happen in the west anymore. Things are going eastwards, which is great for us. Due to our experience, of being close to actual horror, and the actual consequences of this ideology of cultural capitalism, the capitalism of human relations – we are in a good position to criticize it. But I still hope for certain good effects of capitalism to happen here, people being hired based on merit, people being more self-employed, taking more initiative over reality.
But there is still this high degree of disillusionment here. Most young people want to leave and they feel as if there are no choices for them here.
But we do have a choice. Sartre’s philosophy is about these things, and he makes it very clear. We can try to lie to ourselves that we are powerless, but lying is futile. For example, Sartre’s basic maxim is this: If you are handicapped, you still have a choice as to how you perceive yourself. Will you see yourself as an invalid? It is your choice what to do, regardless of your position or circumstance. So we still have an option of what perspective we will take. I think it is clear from the past 20 years that this perspective, this mass depression that is mainstream in our country, brought us no good and will lead us to no good. We have to force ourselves into some crazy levels of enthusiasm and optimism, even if that happens to be hazardous for our own health and wellbeing.
I think there is something happening to people who were born in 1986 or before. I don’t really count on them to be willing to shake things up. We have young people in this country, who were born in 1994 and after, who are doing amazing things. They seem more attuned to the way things are going, working, and going wrong, on a much larger scale. And the local way of thinking is what is destroying us.
Do you mean like this Sarajevo-centered attitude?
It is a phenomena regarding making art for Sarajevo. Films for Sarajevo. Music for Sarajevo. From us to us. The quality of things produced in Sarajevo is very low. Our degree of acceptance of poor stuff is high, regarding any form of communication and creation. We are very tolerant to low quality. This is our schizophrenia. The Internet allows us to read real literature, listen to real music, and we do this in our private lives. Then the stuff we end up producing for ourselves, from ourselves is ridiculously bad and outdated. Especially when it comes to music. Even at the Academy, the examples that they teach are only the best things. Then the stuff that is produced here is out of tune and out of touch with the stuff we before agreed is good. There is a huge gap between what we admire and what we produce. Take MESS Festival for example. We all love MESS and everyone goes there. However, the shows we make are not ambitious enough, not ambitious on the scale MESS shows. The production possibilities are also very low. But lets try to do something. We know this is the way, but we are not following it. It is schizophrenia. Towards many things, towards ourselves and our position. Of course, there already are ambitious people around us doing things in the right way, but they are very few.
So how do people even begin to change this?
Well, its easy to feel lonely in Sarajevo with certain ideas. I think that a lot of people, including me, in Sarajevo have a problem in lacking a partner in conversation (sagovornik). A real partner to foster enriching conversations, someone with a similar degree of enthusiasm, honesty and curiosity.
This touches on my experiences in Dublin. I saw their scene there and the way they communicate with one another. People there collaborate. They welcomed me and let me in. I wanted to meet the best people there and wanted to work with avant garde cinema and music people, such as Rouzbeh Rashidi and Patrick Kelleher. It was these experiences there that prompted me to want to attend the Academy of Performing Arts. In Ireland I started working in the avant garde scene. The degree of collaboration there is the opposite of what we have here. In Sarajevo, people are a part of these small cliques. Everything functions in pockets. So here we have to find mechanisms through which we will make a complete break with this. We shouldn’t want to be like the existing establishment at all. Our existing culture of establishment is to blame for the poor cultural situation. It is not turbo-folk that is the cause for the poor cultural scene. The actual difference is that people involved in the turbo-folk scene know something about marketing that we don’t. Their way of doing business is better and has found a way to reach wide audiences. Their marketing is better than ours. And it is crucial to know these things. People just have to be exposed to certain content. I don’t think that people have a priori negative attitudes towards modern stuff here. In economics, habit is key for everything. You end up loving the things that you are exposed to. Here, we have been exposed to very low quality content for the past decade or so. In the end, people let the degree of acceptance of low quality content go up. And In the end we accept it. This is what happened to us.
Like a self-imposed trap? The longer the collective allows it to perpetuate, the longer it will go on?
Of course. All people who are pessimistic, they actually have more right than me, have more facts to base their opinion on. But the question then is what do you want? We just have to break down this clan spirit. Our culture is clan-based. There is something here, in the spirit of the city actually blocking you, a paralysis that is inhibiting. I didn’t have an easy time when I returned to Sarajevo. I remembered how it should be done, based on my experiences in Dublin. And then returning here, to a culture of inhibition, it’s called ‘ofirno’, a key cultural concept here, that means embarrassing. This collectivist other that doesn’t actually exist. I’m doing nothing and I’m cool, and you are exposing yourself and turning yourself into an embarrassment. It is in everything, in how people talk, behave, make love. It is the Zeitgeist of this place.
How much of these ideas were made visible in your play?
This play that we made touches upon these issues, and I hope that it is visible. What is important is that it is a play made by young people and it took place at SARTR theatre. Nihad Kresevljakovic, the new director of SARTR, did a great job with the theater. He did the most important thing, which is to open it up to students and young people. Because our problem is that we are closed to each other, in the way we communicate, how artists communicate and these small pockets of artists that are scattered throughout the city. It is what is destroying us.
So this play I directed was part of my exam for the second year. Someone recommend having it at SARTR. It is related to war. It follows the lines of how do we treat our experience? How can our experience be important for someone else? How do we make our experience globally relevant?
Relating to this play, I have my personal experiences there. It is about three people in a war camp who are about to be executed in the morning. They ask themselves, what should I do, think, believe, feel, and should I go on? Now that it is about to end for us, do the things I have done in my life, my ideas and my convictions make sense? Are they meaningful or not? For some of them, the end justifies what they did, and others become nihilists.
So the main question is, what do I do with my ideals in the face of death? I am not saying that our society is about to die. But maybe it should die and give birth to something better, out of the ashes of this political situation.
So given all the problems in the art scene here, how do you assess films from B&H?
It can be argued that our films, even though they are about war, are not really political films. We discussed this in our film history class. We were shown films from Brazil, Glauber Rocha films, and they are very political, in your face films. The form has to mirror this. Our forms usually have very simple forms. The problem with our films is the form, the script, the way stories are told. The form in many cases is not political and is instead very convenient.
Final Words:
The German director Fassbinder had this idea of people eventually becoming the things they hate. It is one of his beautiful ideas, and it is what is going on here a lot. He had this idea that when you are segregated (dominated), the degree of domination you suffer is equal to the degree of dominance you impose on the others below you. The degree of what we suffer is the degree of the suffering we, mostly unknowingly, produce in others.
Fassbinder had a prolific career in his short life. And this is what we need here in a way, we need to shoot a film in two weeks, and not wait for big money to make movies.
We also need a platform. I hope to help make one, and I hope others will do the same. We need a platform; to give people space, where they will be able to put on shows, have gigs. Because here, whenever space is opened up, it is for that person and his/her clique. It is horrible. I want to open something, but at the same time to invite the best possible outcome, to have people come in with ideas I had never heard about. There are amazing people in this city, but who do not want to be a part of this clan system. These are the people that have to be exposed, as opposed to the people who fill our tabloids, and make normal people feel very low about their condition and circumstances.