Sports are often the source of national pride and unity: the whole nation tends to come together and stay behind an individual or a national team. But in the former Yugoslavia and the countries that succeeded it, fandom for an individual sportsperson or a national team is raised to the level of mythic adoration. National sports-powered “mythos” sometimes even gets epic proportions in an “alternative history” imagination. Some say that the collapse of Yugoslavia became possible after the unfortunate loss of the football national team against Argentina in the quarter-finals of the 1990 World Cup in Italy. Others harbour a conspiracy theory that the Americans were so frustrated with their college basketball players losing to Yugoslav teams that they forced the International Olympic Committee to change the rules regarding the professionals competing and created their own dream team of the best NBA players.

After a fantastic career in the short format crowned with the 2015 EFA award for Picnic and his fiction-feature debut Mater [+lee también:
crítica
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entrevista: Jure Pavlović
ficha de la película] (2019), Croatian filmmaker Jure Pavlović has decided to try a new format – the feature-length documentary combining sports and the political drama of the Yugoslav basketball national team’s last hurrah at the European Championships in Rome in 1991. The premiere of The Lost Dream Team closed the 72nd edition of the Pula Film Festival. Judging by these events’ place in the collective memory all over the West Balkans, and by the rather universal angle Pavlović takes to accommodate international audiences, the film should have a healthy festival run, a theatrical release in several countries, and a prolonged exposure on television afterwards.

Throughout the 1980s, the Yugoslav men’s basketball national team became a powerhouse at continental and world championships, as well as at the Olympics, with players like Dražen Petrović, Vlade Divac, Toni Kukoč, Dino Rađa, Saša Đorđević, Predrag Danilović amongst others. The match in the finals of the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona never took place because Yugoslavia ceased to exist a year before, and the dissolution was followed by a bloody war. It was in fact during the very week of the European basketball championship in Rome that Slovenia and Croatia seceded from Yugoslavia and the short-lasting war in Slovenia broke out. After winning the championship, the national representatives did not have a country to return to.

Jure Pavlović interviews all the players from the national team as well as their head coach Dušan Duda Ivković and the team manager, but the focal point is Jurij Zdovc, the only Slovenian on the team, who was called by the government of his “new country” to leave the national team (and his comrades and friends) because of the Yugoslav aggression on Slovenia. Zdovc was also the focal point of a newspaper article written by Croatian journalist and novelist Boris Dežulović that actually inspired Pavlović to take a dive into the topic and the memory from his own childhood.

The result is a finely made classical documentary mixing sports and politics, to cathartic effect for the audience that remembers the events, and creating curiosity in younger spectators. Pavlović's approach, combining national television and private archives as well as newly shot interviews with the players and staff members, functions well thanks to the slickness in Dario Hacek’s camerawork, Julij Zornik’s masterful sound design and Ivan Vasić’s editing which turns the talking heads mode into something more artistic. The Lost Dream Team might seem like a simple piece of nostalgia, but it is also a deeply moving piece of cinema.

The Lost Dream Team is a co-production between Croatia, Serbia, Slovenia and Italy staged by the companies Sekvenca, Set Sail Films, Tramal Films, Articolture and Wake Up Films in association with the Croatian Radio-Television. Goodfellas is handling international sales.