After the Ides of March

Written for Kosovo Online: Muharem Bazdulj

One of the most famous lines in 20th-century world poetry is Eliot's: "April is the cruellest month." (This is the first line of the famous poem "The Waste Land.") It would not be an exaggeration to say that in Serbian history, every month has been more or less cruel. Agreeing with Eliot is not a problem; it’s enough to remember April 6, 1941. However, if we look at the last thirty to forty years, the key (and perhaps the cruellest) month in Serbian history is March.

From March 9, through the assassination of Zoran Djindjic, the death of Slobodan Milosevic, to this year's March 15 as the day of the largest protest in Serbian history, March has been a time of exceptionally turbulent events.

All these events took place in the first half of March, leading up to the Ides of March and on the very Ides of March (which traditionally, according to the old Roman calendar, fall on March 15). If we focus only on Kosovo and Metohija, the focus is on two dates in the second half of March. One is March 17, the day of the so-called March pogrom. The other is, of course, March 24, the day the NATO bombing of the then Federal Republic of Yugoslavia began, with a focus in many ways on the Kosovo and Metohija region. The bombing ended with the Kumanovo Agreement, which again meant that Serbia no longer had formal control over its entire territory, especially its southern province.

There is visible solidarity in Serbian society with the victims of the March pogrom, but it is interesting that this topic, even after more than twenty years, is more present in the media than in art. One of the few truly valuable artifacts stemming from the March pogrom is Dusan Milic’s film Mrak (Darkness).
Viewers who hadn't seen it before had the opportunity to watch it again on television a few days ago. In a strange coincidence, during those days, director Dusan Milic gave an interesting interview to a regional portal about the film’s genesis and his own inspiration: "I started from a real letter from a twelve-year-old girl to then-President of Serbia Boris Tadic about how she and her parents live in Kosovo.

In the letter, she particularly spoke about the problems children, her peers, face in those former war zones, or enclaves where small and isolated Serbian communities live in Kosovo. What Serbs feared was that after the pogrom, when Orthodox churches, monasteries, and other buildings were destroyed, the people who lived there would be in danger. The pogrom started on March 17, and people feared that, during Orthodox Easter that year, all those who remained would be expelled. My film deals with the great fear of these people. It was originally supposed to be called 'Fear' because it begins with the sentence from the girl: 'Dear President, I am sitting under the table in the dark and I am very scared.'

This letter, about half a page long, really reached the then-President of Serbia and was read at a United Nations Security Council meeting."

On one hand, it was a huge shock to everyone who heard it, but it did not result in any international actions.”

The film began its artistic life in 2022. Its world premiere was on January 23 in Trieste. The domestic premiere was exactly thirty days later at the FEST festival. The regular theatrical release began on March 17 of the same year; not by coincidence, of course, on the anniversary of the March pogrom.
The film is excellent on several levels. There is no pandering to foreign audiences in it. The combination of an artistic film and genre horror has not been made so convincingly in a long time, even at a global level. Since, well, most of the action takes place in the dark, the effect and suggestiveness largely depend on the sound, and the sound is incredibly well executed. Also, the acting performances are consistently outstanding, and some are even legendary. I primarily mean the two main actors: Slavko Stimac and Danica Curcic.

The Italians were co-producers of the film. The members of the Italian KFOR troops in the film are the “good guys.” In that sense, it is nice that the film had its premiere in Trieste. But without underestimating the festival in Trieste, this film deserved to premiere at a “bigger” festival. If it was, for some reason, very important for it to be in Italy, then it should have been at Venice, at the Mostra. The problem, however, was likely that the film is too close to the “Serbian standpoint” and does not align with the dominant Western narrative about the wars that accompanied the breakup of Yugoslavia.

Fortunately, films stay, and contexts change. Mrak is a film that will stay. And it is a film that, as one can predict, will age well.