Yahoo Lifestyle A Hero Meets A Tragic End In Cannes-Winning Oscar Contender ‘The Man Who Could Not Remain Silent’
When Tomo Buzov boarded a train in Belgrade, Serbia the morning of February 27, 1993, on his way to visit his son in Montenegro, he had no way of knowing what lay in store for him or that his bravery would be remembered to this day.
As the train wound through newly independent Bosnia, it came to a sudden halt and was boarded by members of a Serbian militia. Heavily armed men went car by car demanding to know the ethnicity and religious identity of everyone on board.
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The Oscar-contending drama The Man Who Could Not Remain Silent retells what happened on that train as war flared in the former Yugoslavia and old grievances fueled new atrocities. The film directed by Nebojša Slijepčević won the Palme d’Or for Short Film at the Cannes Film Festival in May.
“This film is based on a real event,” Slijepčević explained during a recent Q&A in Hollywood, “during the war in ex-Yugoslavia when a civilian train was stopped in between two stations by Serbian paramilitary forces who entered and started taking from the train civilians who had Muslim names. And only one person out of more than 500 passengers there stood up to them. It was Tomo Buzov. He was not Muslim himself, but he couldn’t sit still watching this horrible ethnic cleansing happening.”
The film shows the militia zeroing in on Muslim passengers and removing them from the train at gunpoint. The Man Who Could Not Remain Silent is told not from the perspective of Tomo Buzov, but from another Croatian man in the same compartment as Buzov who vows to stick up for a young Muslim man seated across from him whose life hangs in the balance.
“I saw something very universal in this story… something that I can identify with and many people can identify with because many of us find ourselves in a situation when we witness some sort of violence that is not against us. We are safe in this situation, but we witness somebody suffering from the violence. And then it’s up to us to decide, what should we do?” Slijepčević said. “Should we intervene somehow and risk our own safety, or should we sit and mind our own business, [stare at] our shoes, and then we have to live with our conscience after that? And unfortunately, I think most of us remain silent in such situations, and that’s why the world is not a very nice place to live in at the moment.”
Croatian actor Goran Bogdan plays the man who promises to protect his fellow passenger, but in the end keeps quiet. Silvio Mumelaš stars as the young Bosnian Muslim, with Dragan Micanovic playing the true hero, Buzov.
“Of course, the idea of the film from the very first moment was that the main character in the film will be the person who stayed silent,” the director said. “That’s the dramatic irony of the title, but of the film as well… I wanted Goran Bogdan from the very first moment, first, because he’s fantastic actor. And second, I think he has sort of a heroic appearance. He’s someone you can imagine to be cast as a hero character. And I believed him from the very first moment.”
Producer Katarina Prpic described the challenge of finding a shooting location that would fit within the production’s budget, explaining that the team eventually selected “a main train station in the capital of Croatia in the place where trains are being washed and polished and so on. This particular train was not in use anymore — because we wanted one that was used back in that time, in the beginning of the ’90s. So, we took a train that was ready to be demolished basically, and we decorated it and shot in it.”
She continued, “The real train… is really tiny, and it was a really difficult task to do the mis-en-scène there. So, we had many, many rehearsals on the spot with the actors and with the crew, and we basically shot the film several times with several cameras and cell phones just to understand what will be seen in what way and how the actors will move.”
Slijepčević added, “This train is not technically usable. Because of safety, we didn’t have permission to really drive the train on the open tracks. They gave us only like 100 meters of a track that we could drive the train. So, it had to be very precise. When the camera is passing over the window, the train is moving, but when it goes to Goran’s face, the train actually already stopped because we couldn’t move it anymore. But we pulled the shade, so you don’t see outside. It was really very, very precisely rehearsed, all of it, and choreographed. It was quite demanding.”
On that chilling day in February 1993, upwards of 20 Bosnian Muslim men were taken from the train in what later became known as the Štrpci massacre. Buzov was the only non-Bosnian Muslim seized. The young Bosnian Muslim man he stood up for was spared. Buzov and the others pulled off the train were transported to a nearby town where they were executed and tossed into the River Drina.
On the street in Belgrade where Buzov lived, a plaque has been placed with the inscription, “Tomo Buzov. JNA [Yugoslav National Army] Captain First Class. In memory of the humanity and courage of the man who lived at this address.”
Slijepčević said he gave his cast a simple instruction as cameras rolled. “I asked all the actors to imagine, I told them, this is not a film about history. This is not a historical lesson,” he recalled. “This happens now for all of us at this very moment. Let’s play it like that.”
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