GORAN DEVIC, the author of the documentary film "IMPORTED CROWS" REMEMBER THE EVIL NOT TO REPEAT IT

Goran, you studied the law, archeology, finished the Film Academy . With the film “Imported Crows” you won awards at the festivals in Motovun, Sarajevo , you were in Tirana, Rotterdam . How do people in different part of Europe (in the Balkans, I presume, they all understand the things in the same way) understand what the film is about and what the massages of your heroes are?

When we made the film, the editor and I knew that we were doing something very ‘strong”. We were afraid to edit the material, as we knew that we can mess up the thing, since the material was offering many things. We knew we were doing something good, but probably something very local, so something that would be very legible in all its “letters” widely on the regions of former Yugoslavia, and felt that the English, the French, the Americans, the Canadians might understand the film. They watch it in a different way, see in it what is universal, and in fact lose some 10 to 20 percent of the meaning. On the internet web page of the Rotterdam Festival I read a fact that astonishes me, although knowing how the authors from these parts work maybe it shouldn't be so, that the budget of this film has been as much as 100 EUR. Is it possible? Yes, it is possible. The budget of this film was spent on two trips by my car from Zagreb to Sisak, for the petrol, then on 3 daily allowances of 20 EUR for the sound man, then for burek for the crew, with three cassettes that were paid by the Academy. That was the complete cost of the filmmaking, and not taking into consideration our work, technical equipment that we did not have to pay. Of course, there was no fee, as it is a student's film. Able and knows to make films for 100 EUR is a qualification that can only contribute to my “rating” at the Faculty.

In a metaphoric way you point at different things unusual in a society that are difficult to be fit into a prevailing frame.

My theory is that my town and my country I come from are in a scrape, in which there is no identity. More precisely, that identity was very violently and quickly changed. Whenever the masques are changed in that way, an internal misunderstanding occurs. Our society found itself in one moment, without exterior, and the interior enemy as well and in that moment it could not function as in the last 10 – 15 years it was in a constant opposition to one thing or another. When that opposition was gone, probably it had to be invented. And so the crows were imposed as a suitable replacement, a surrogate for, as they would say in a contemporary psychoanalysis, "the other". The crows represent only themselves in my film and I think that the film was edited in a very explicit way. Anyway, it is nothing new. When i was in Sarajevo , at the Festival, I met Dusan

Makavejev, who told me a story from the time when he was shooting "The Case of a PTT clerk", when he looked for obscure professions. He then met the people who killed the rats, not rat prisoners, who already then told him a fantastic story. It says that at that time, in the fifties, the Belgrade underground was overcrowded by the rats, which were not “our” Yugoslav rodents, but a special sort of Siberian rats, murderous ones, that had been brought in by the Russians. This means that the things repeat and that this film could probably have been made at some other place and with some other creatures that would play the role of the e n e m y, as well. That much about the metaphors.

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