At the second annual Montenegro Film Rendezvous in Herceg Novi in late August, filmmakers, producers and industry experts came together to shed light on and celebrate the growing Montenegrin industry. Here, we highlight several successes and future successes, as shown by a few key players in conversation with Cineuropa, including the filmmaker behind Montenegro’s submission to the Oscars, Nikola Vukčević.

Montenegrin director Ivan Salatić world-premiered his second feature, Wondrous Is the Silence of My Master [+leggi anche:
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intervista: Ivan Salatić
scheda film] (Montenegro/Italy/France/Croatia/Serbia), in IFFR’s Tiger Competition earlier this year. At the Montenegro Film Rendezvous, Salatić also pitched Velora Morn, a psychological drama project in early development being produced by himself and Dušan Kasalica, for Meander Film.

Salatić explained that the idea for Wondrous Is the Silence of My Master began after he made his first film, You Have the Night [+leggi anche:
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intervista: Ivan Salatić
scheda film], which helped him realise that he was “starting to lose faith in reality”. From there, he decided he wanted to make a historical movie that dealt with a “kind of poetic reality” upon reading a book by a Serbian author on the historical figure of Petar Petrović – famous not just in Montenegro, but also the entire region. Exploring the story, he began to fictionalise the life of this figure, which “led [him] to make a film that is about power, and being at the margins of culture and colonialism”, he explained.

“I think that art and film should be about our undeveloped part of language and something that is a struggle to communicate. I wanted to speak about history – it’s a very dangerous place because, as we can all see, history is material. You can use it for any political purpose, and it’s a way to manipulate people. We have to think about what it is that we want to take from history and how we want to interpret it. Art gives you the freedom to do that. Art should be free to expose really horrible things.”

His attention to reappropriating history speaks to broader sociopolitical changes and attempts to open up dialogue in a polarised world. “In a local sense, the film is completely different because this person is almost like a saint here. Nothing in the movie says that this is Petar Petrović, the real ruler, but there’s this kind of uncanniness when you watch the film. I hope it will open up some kind of discussion and a new approach to something that is too mythological.”

Another project presented at the Montenegro Film Rendezvous was Dive In, written and directed by Maja Todorović, and produced by Đorđe Vojvodić for Bitter Frames (known for Guardians of the Formula [+leggi anche:
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intervista: Dragan Bjelogrlić
scheda film], which world-premiered at Locarno in 2023). Todorović is known for being the writer of several domestic and regional box-office hits, including Ana Maria Rossi’s Ajvar [+leggi anche:
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intervista: Ana Maria Rossi
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The story tells of a woman and a man who seem to be a perfect couple on the outside, with successful careers and a pristine kind of love, as exemplified by an era of performativity on social media, as Todorović described. However, the two decide to begin reconnecting with the origins of their own trauma to take part in the titular action and find out what they really want out of life. For the filmmaker, directing her first feature, it was important to set this story in her hometown of Herceg Novi, which she describes as breathing life into the dynamics of the film in a particular way. “It’s a special place with a kind of special mentality and special pressure. We are raised here with the sea, with a kind of freedom to have a certain type of life, but also some restrictions that create these characters.”

Nikola Vukčević pitched his work-in-progress piece, a documentary about Janko Nilović, an acclaimed but somewhat unknown French musician with Montenegrin heritage. However, much of his attention has been devoted to Tower of Strength [+leggi anche:
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scheda film] (Montenegro/Serbia/Croatia/Germany), which has just been announced as Montenegro’s submission for the Oscars (see the news). As described by Vukčević himself, the story takes place during World War II and centres on a Muslim family who decide to shelter a Christian boy being chased by a fascist Muslim squad seeking to kill him. The entire film was shot in Montenegro, with Vukěvić explaining another production hurdle: language. “Seventy percent of the film was shot in a language I do not speak – Albanian. For me, it was challenging to do it in a proper way, but I’m satisfied with it.”

The filmmaker highlighted the strength of the team behind Tower of Strength, including a screenwriter duo consisting of Ana Vujadinović and Melina Pota Koljević, along with two international script advisors to assist with making the story more global. For Vukčević, it was important that the film went beyond simply being a war drama. “I have battles and I have guns, but it’s an intimate drama about the siege of a home undertaking a noble act. It’s a drama about a hero who decides to say no to the power of those who are stronger. But I’m happy because the story resonates through such different cultures everywhere. It’s a story that’s understandable by somebody from one community or another because of values that rise above nation and religion.”