Vesna Ljubić
In women’s history, pioneers hold a special place-those women who were the first in a particular field or who singularly stood out through their achievements or discoveries. The works of pioneers, whatever their domain, almost invariably hold a privileged place in women’s history and are impossible to bypass in the male-centered official histories precisely because they were the first at something.
Even when their feats, for example artistic ones, do not meet certain standards or are average, they remain recorded as breakthroughs of women in a particular area and retain what we call historical value.
Once we recognize this fact-essentially a well-established commonplace of cultural memory-the case of Vesna Ljubić, a film, television, and radio director and screenwriter, and the first woman in Bosnia and Herzegovina to direct a feature-length film, appears all the more unusual. This film author, with a modest oeuvre, truly deserves to be counted among the pioneers of cinematic art in Bosnia and Herzegovina, but not only because she was the first. Her oeuvre, rich in genres and formats (short films, feature, documentary, television), unquestionably ranks among the artistic peaks of Yugoslav and Bosnian-Herzegovinian cinematography. She is the recipient of numerous prestigious film awards, but almost exclusively at international festivals. Although primarily a film artist- director and screenwriter-she built her long career in radio, creating works that are yet to attract researchers’ attention. She directed and edited hundreds of programs and radio dramas, saved archival material and even the complete dramatic program of the public broadcaster. Her entire professional life was characterized by deep faith in art and culture and their power to transform consciousness. Excluding pirated copies, which are characterized by both temporariness and poor quality, Vesna Ljubić’s films not available on digital platforms; at best, if you’re lucky and if you even watch television, you might stumble upon one of her films on rerun programs of public television stations. They are publicly screened very rarely, usually as part of special screenings for which a suitable occasion is typically sought.
It is a bitter irony that contemporary Bosnian-Herzegovinian cinema is widely regarded as a field where female directors and screenwriters-such as Jasmila Žbanić, Aida Begić, Elma Tataragić, and others-form an essential and celebrated creative force, while the memory of the pioneer who paved the way has been almost entirely forgotten.
Brief biographical information about Vesna Ljubić, which can be easily found, says roughly the following. She was born on May 25, 1938, in Prnjavor. She graduated from the Department of Comparative Literature at the Faculty of Philosophy in Sarajevo, then completed film directing studies at the renowned Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome. Her early works include the first film Putovanje (The Journey) and the diploma film Smrt se otplaćuje živeći (Death is Paid for by Living, 1972).
Notably, during her student days, she worked as an assistant to Federico Fellini. Little is known about this episode of her life, as she rarely spoke about it. According to her colleague Miralem Ovčina, she occasionally mentioned “Fellini’s way of working with actors-his particular method of pushing them, sometimes even a bit harshly, out of their comfort zones, urging them to shed their egos and acting habits, and to build the character with him from scratch, just as the maestro envisioned, in a way that best suited his cinematic vision.” Contemporary film researchers emphasize that her work was certainly influenced by the great mentor Fellini, but Ovčina notes how she was never his epigone: “It’s likely that, “standing on the shoulders of a giant” like Fellini and working within the gravity of his poetics, she adopted certain aspects of his artistic expression-which many have rightly pointed out. But to me, Vesna was a strong and self-aware creative force who (…) remained authentic and forged her own distinctive path. She found a poetics of her own, one that blends raw, elemental life with poetic, mythical, and symbolic elements-both in film and across all the different artistic forms she engaged with.”
Upon returning to Bosnia and Herzegovina, she was employed at RTV Sarajevo and spent her entire working life in television and radio, primarily on the Drama Program, where she directed and edited various programs and radio dramas. Her role continued after postwar transformations of this media house. But more on Vesna’s lifelong romance with the radio medium will be said later.
Soon after her studies, she began making films. In 1971, she filmed the documentary Halil Tikveša about the famous Bosnian-Herzegovinian artist, and immediately after that, the feature TV film Simha, based on a story by Isak Samokovlija. Here, two important traits of her creativity are already visible-love for visual art and literature, as well as interest in the life of the Bosnian Herzegovinian Jewish community.
Although the war briefly interrupted her career, which until then was on an upward trajectory, it did not stop her creativity, because even during the war she worked on the film Ecce Homo (1994), which brought her excellent reviews and international recognition. After the war Ljubić had a creative pause, transitioning slowly into documentary rather than feature form. She realised documentaries Sveti prah Indije (The Holy Dust of India, 1999), and the brilliant Adio kerida (Adieu Kerida 2002), a love letter to Sarajevo’s Sephardic Jews and their timeless music. Vesna Ljubić also made the film Bosanska rapsodija na rubu znanosti (Bosnian Rhapsody on the Edge of Science, 2011), satirically addressing the famous visit of the Moroccan “healer” Meki Torabi to Sarajevo. Yes, she accomplished all that, but who she was, really? In the words of her friend Dubravka Zrnčić-Kulenović: “When we talk about Vesna, I immediately think of her persistence on the one hand and passion on the other, but also of a gentleness and warmth she possessed. She believed in what she can and wants, and she fought herself to ensure that what she created reaches the viewers, and that she stands very firmly behind her work. Her passion, but also incredible imagination, always had a foundation in spirituality. As if every plant that grows and every person she met has its own soul, its purpose of existence and encounter with her.”
Also, according to Ovčina, a versatile artist: “Dedicated, highly competent, inspiring, and demanding, both as an editor and a collaborator. I had the impression that she lived her artistic calling intensely, twenty-four hours a day, and that even that sometimes didn’t feel like enough for her. Her large and diverse body of work stands as testament to this.” Vesna Ljubić died in Sarajevo in 2021, from complications caused by Covid-19. Behind her remains a genre-rich film, television, and radio oeuvre, hundreds of radio shows and dramas she edited and created, scripts that never reached production, and a generation of radio workers she taught all she knew. After her death, no Sarajevo film festival held a retrospective or even a screening to honor her. And about that-something later. Let us now look at the themes this unjustly forgotten film author dealt with.
Defiant peripheries
Her reserved nature,and even more so, a systemic unwillingness to embrace a creator who belonged to no one but herself are among the deepest reasons we know so little today about the films of Vesna Ljubić. As mentioned earlier, they can be viewed very rarely, except if you have the stomach for piracy.
Films by Vesna Ljubić Simha, Defiant Delta, The Last Switchman of the Narrow Gauge Railway, and Adio kerida are available in pirated version on Youtube.
From what is available, we can conclude that Vesna Ljubić in her artistic quests was especially interested in marginal stories, unusual phenomena, eccentric characters with untold stories. Both thematically and in terms of film language and aesthetics, she resisted expectations:
“Ljubić does follow the two dominant cinematic trends of the former Yugoslavia: the avant-garde movement known as the Black Wave, which produces political, polemical films, nor the mainstream practice of partisan or other conformist film,” writes director Rada Šešić, who started her career, among other things, as assistant director on The Switchman.
Vesna’s first feature film Defiant Delta is stands as the finest example of this conscious nonconformity. An unnamed village in the Neretva delta is the victim of two scourges-natural and human. Annual floods destroy the valuable work of villagers and take lives, but so do armies that periodically raze what has been built, each time in a new uniform, with different epaulets. The film’s chronotope is indefinite, almost like in a fairy tale, although some spatial and temporal markers are recognizably local; it acts as a condensed allegory of the Balkan wars and colonizations, whose cycle of destruction and renewal never ceases. The film focuses on the character Ivana, a visionary who tries to save the village with her bold idea of a tunnel that’ll the village to the sea and prevent further floods. But explosives needed to achieve that can only be obtained by approaching soldiers. Ivana will, however, do whatever it takes. Ljubić gently portrays the tightly knit village community, protectively inclined towards the unusual girl whose only companion is a goat. Unfortunately, their care will be enough to save Ivana, too bold and radical for the environment in which she grew up in.
Long lyrical shots of boats floating on water in a rhapsody of light, old Herzegovinian songs intertwined with a dreamy soundtrack (composed by the famous Vangelis), the epic daring of the young heroine-all this makes the film quite unusual for the era in which it appeared, yet perfectly contemporary as an allegory of the Balkan provinces ravaged equally by cruel nature and even crueler colonial armies.
The Last Switchman of the Narrow Gauge Railway also depicts a community doomed to extinction, but this time in the very recognizable context of Yugoslav socialism. The very fact that it deals with the final closure of the narrow-gauge railway, which was a pledge of modernization and industrialization of Yugoslavia, clearly testifies that the author here, unlike in Delta, wanted to offer a more precise, even somewhat satirical, picture of the Bosnian province and to tie it more strongly with current socio-political movements. A subtle critique of Yugoslav ideology of progress, which implies inevitable and therefore necessarily cruel technological advancement, is intertwined here with a gallery of eccentric characters of railway workers and their families. Particularly interesting are the diverse female characters: the “station housewife,” the woman of the impossible name Japanolija, permanently disdainful of the primitiveness and backwardness of villagers, the exhibitionist Klara, granddaughter of the station builder Rudolf von Messner, Stana, a would-be tavern singer who escapes from abusers by marrying a harmless railway worker, and others. The downfall of the provincial railway station, already distant from the life that always happens elsewhere, is portrayed with tenderness and sympathy for all that is transient and vulnerable, doomed to disappear. Technological progress, which will transform the country, meant the end of life as these people knew it, and, ultimately, the termination of the community they built despite all their differnces. The film only discreetly hints at the later consequences of such socio technological shifts: entire ways of life were lost with the closing of narrow-gauge railways that meant a vital link to larger towns for many peasants, consequently forcing them to move to towns, then to urban centers. The fact that Ljubić manages to interweave a deadly serious story with warmth and subtle irony only testifies to the mastery of her cinematic storytelling.
Lamija Milišić is primarily interested in spatial construction in a series of Ljubić’s films and notes how the director shows a “tendency toward characters without a home passing through transitional spaces,” and the transitional spaces themselves such as the village in the Neretva delta which begins life anew every season, as well as the space of the narrow-gauge railway station, transient by its roadside identity.
This tells us probably the most important connection of all these mutually very different films-a love for the all things transient, fragile, but never ephemeral. This impression can easily be extended to Adio kerida, a film about searching for lost ancestors and a community that was also historically cruelly “transitional” in these lands, and whose inevitable decay the film, itself an art form of “stopped time,” strives to immortalize. But more on Adio Kerida later. A similar impulse is also obvious in some of Ljubić’s radio programs, few of which are available online. The radio documentary Hasanaginica, co-signed with Miralem Ovčina, leads us through adaptations and screen adaptations of the famous South Slavic folk ballad. Although it cites all the well-known authors who dramatized it- Šantić, Ogrizović, Isaković, Alispahić-most attention is devoted to the amateur theater in Livno, since that town was recognized as the place that best, or perhaps with the most love, kept the memory of that ballad alive. Interviews with elderly actors who still know their lines verbatim vividly testify to how lovingly and gently Vesna Ljubić treated fragile and transient cultural phenomena, those in which the life of a community is best reflected. Moreover, Vesna Ljubić was never interested in urban stories; the terrain where she filmed her most convincing works is precisely the Bosnian (or Herzegovinian) province, whether an unnamed village in the Neretva delta or the roadside station “Brezovi dani,” or provincial cultural phenomena such as amateur theaters or folk “healers” in Bosanska rapsodija. Even when dealing with an urban story, Ljubić chooses a minority community whose fate is disappearance or dispersion (Sarajevo Sephardim in the films Simha and Adio kerida)-all in an effort to preserve these authentic, unusual forms of life from devastation. During and after the war, Ljubić increasingly showed a preference for documentary film. But before we address the film Adio kerida, in which, as Zrnčić Kulenović says, much of Vesna Ljubić herself is present, let us say something about the documentary that perhaps resonated the loudest abroad-Ecce Homo: Behold the Man.
A fictional kind of truth
This short documentary film from 1994 is officially described as “not political, but rather a personal reflection on death”. Ljubić chose not to leave besieged Sarajevo, despite having had several opportunities to do so. She stayed to work, to protect the artifacts of Bosnian-Herzegovinian culture from destruction, to breathe life into the radio, which at the time was the one of the rare cultural outlets for Sarajevans, and, of course, to film-constantly under the threat of snipers and shelling. “I always felt like a citizen of the world, at home everywhere. But when the siege of Sarajevo startd, I felt I had to share the fate of my city and its people,” she said when asked about her decision. Instead of leaving, she decided to defy the aggression through art. She filmed everyday life during the siege of Sarajevo from spring 1992 almost until the end of 1994, without voiceover commentary, only through bare images and a soundtrack that crosses the sounds of prayers of all four monotheistic religions present in this city with the cawing of crows. Ljubić shows us funerals on improvised carts, ruins, a burned tram, destroyed apartments. She testifies how she collected nettles under shelling, talks about her deteriorating health due to prolonged hunger, recounted how she went through the Tunnel of Hope at the moment it was hit by a grenade: “People behind pushed me to run forward at that very moment to catch a pause between bombardments, and I ran over all those dead bodies not knowing if the blood on me was theirs or mine.” The most moving moment of the film is the scene of the tombstone of Danica Ljubić, the director’s mother, where we also see her. However, Ljubić refuses the position of martyr. “I am no martyr and don’t make me into one. Everyone there went through the same things,” she told Gordana Crnković. That’s precisely the spirit of this film document-its harsh realism is there to testify and record, not to judge, argue, or even mourn. It just says: here is a human, and by doing so it reclaims the image of war which sensationalist Western media turned into a morbid attraction. “Human dying is an intimate thing, and yet cameras all over Sarajevo peered into people’s guts and blood, denying them the privacy of death; making out of it an almost pornographic spectacle,” says the director.
Ecce Homo was shown at twenty world festivals, including the Venice Film Festival and the famous IDFA Amsterdam, where it was the first Bosnian-Herzegovinian film ever shown. After her death, it was publicly shown only once, and not in Sarajevo but in Trieste.
Ljubić sharpened and perfected her documentary expression further in the television documentary Adio Kerida (2002), produced for Television Sarajevo. The film is named after a well-known Sephardic song whose title translates as “Farewell, Beloved,” and follows a young man from Seattle, Peter Lippman, who seeks his long-lost ancestor, a Sarajevo Jew, an Ashkenazi who married a Sephardic woman and fully adopted her culture. He carries an old yellowed photo and a family tale about a man who loved to sing old Sephardic romances. Lippman’s search leads him to the homes of Sarajevo Jews. His curious naivety inspires them to show him their family albums, speak Ladino, the Sephardic language, demonstrate customs, and, naturally, sing songs – a perfect little trick to document and immortalize the life of a culture in retreat. Namely, the fate of Bosnian-Herzegovinian Jews is well known-they found refuge in then Ottoman Bosnia after persecution in Spain, which was, at the time, a somewhat more inclusive society. However, most of them perished in the Holocaust, which, under the command of the fascist puppet regime, the Independent State of Croatia, was carried out with particular zeal and brutality.
Although the story is burdened by history, one would say it demands documentary and factuality, Ljubić playfully and lightly avoids conventional documentary conventions, skillfully mixing in fictional elements. As Crnković notes , both Lippman and his ancestor are real people, but the director used a clever device, presenting the connection between the two as real, although completely fictional, to gain something that is much more intimate and touching than a stereotypical dialogue between the documentarian and his subjects. It is not immediately apparent that this is a “mockumentary” unless one digs deeper; the author justified her choice, Crnković writes, by considering it a useful “stylistic device” to delve deeper into the very subject-the life of the Sephardim. Be that as it may, the final result justifies this little “deception,” because we got an incredibly poetic, at times comic, but always touchingly humane film, whose final scene, a complete surrender to fiction, some would say even magical realism, testifies to the life of a community retreating before the cruelty of history.
Magical frequencies
We already said that Vesna Ljubić earned her pension at Radio Television of Bosnia and Herzegovina. For her, radio was more than a job: it was a refuge. Her colleagues testify best to this, especially those to whom she opened the wonderful world of radio, inspiring in them a creative spirit and professionalism.
“It gave her the possibility to work, explore, without pressure from the industry, complicated processes, or working with large teams. When she returned to radio after filming The Switchman, she was broken. It was too much effort for her. Vesna was a talented woman who struggled to cope with poor organization and the macho film world; she found it difficult to manage everything required to make a film at the time. Radio offered intimacy, the possibility to work more simply but no less convincingly,” said Miralem Ovčina, her longtime collaborator, in an interview for Abraš radio after her death. Ovčina recalled a wartime memory that perfectly illustrates what kind of person Vesna Ljubić was and how much radio as a medium meant to her: “During the war, the radio editorial office was devastated. Vojka Đikić and Vesna Ljubić came to the Grey House then, people were scattered to other editorial offices, holes were patched, and all sorts of things were done to keep the program going. Already in 1993, it was time to restart the drama program. If Vojka and Vesna decided that, there was no chance it wouldn’t be done! Soon we started recording radio novels, docudramas, dramas… all thanks to the persistence of these two magnificent women.” Dubravka Zrnčić-Kulenović recalled Vesna Ljubić’s efforts to save recordings of radio dramas that were endangered during wartime. “At that first meeting, she told me something the public perhaps does not know-that she fought throughout the war to preserve tape recordings on which radio dramas and programs that she considered top-notch were recorded, but which represented the trace of a time that, unfortunately, was slowly disappearing during the war. That fight to preserve them went so far that she even came into conflict with colleagues, because at that time, of course, there were no new tapes and some had to be sacrificed. She immediately suggested to me that, before we even started collaborating, we should meet and start listening to all the tapes she had managed to save.
However, that does not explain the fact that one of her war and several postwar films are even harder to find in public screenings, television reruns, or digital platforms. Some Sarajevo artists who spent the siege period in the city and continued to work practically built serious careers based on their “war merits”. The mere fact that Ecce homo had to be screened/rerun in distant Trieste instead of her native Sarajevo speaks volumes.
We must also consider the fact that the director herself avoided belonging to any artistic ‘clans’ or interest groups. Dubravka Zrnčić-Kulenović put it best: “She was an artist who created in her silences and thrived wonderfully within them.” Or in the words of Miralem Ovčina: “She was a beautiful and intelligent woman who, from the start, on these lands implied that she’ll have many more problems (…) She consciously avoided the film world, wisely guarded her space.” But from a feminist perspective, we understand that her modesty and unobtrusiveness, although perhaps part of her personality, certainly could not not be, in part, a reaction to the perpetually divided, ‘clan-like’ world of art and film, both in the former and current state, a swamp in which careerists and mediocrities ‘swim’ best. “I can’t even imagine how many obstacles, prejudices, and disdain she faced on that path. She was never mentioned at the Sarajevo Film Academy (…) I never had the honor to work with Vesna, but I am endlessly grateful to her for enabling us women to step on the path she paved in the patriarchal world of film,” wrote contemporary Bosnian director Jasmila Žbanić in her in memoriam Facebook post, confirming that even the academic establishment bears some responsibility for neglecting Vesna Ljubić’s heritage.
Of course, we cannot avoid the fact from the beginning of this text: history too easily overlooks women’s works, which undoubtedly happened in the case of the heroine of this text. Bosnian-Herzegovinian cinematography, whether films made before or after the dissolution of Yugoslavia, was largely macho, favoring directors as well as “male” themes and approaches.
Nebojša Jovanović wrote about the characteristic “gender war in which men clash, driven by primal, wild impulses, and women who embody civilization and modernity.”
Although she was never declarative about it, Ljubić approached this motif very polemically, primarily by creating a gallery of diverse female characters, reversing the so-called male gaze (Laura Mulvey ), both in the character of Klara from Skretničar and Ivana from Delta, who reject sexual objectification even when completely naked in the frame. Moreover, her Ivana is the driving force of the plot, a dreamer and innovator working for the good of the community.
It is not unimaginable that her subtle, by today’s standards even shy, resistance to toxic film tropes, precisely because it was such, diverged too much from the film mainstream to be properly valued. Finally, her films advocated the ideal of solidarity of immediate human community-which is completely uninteresting to today’s film taste, not to mention the commercialization of film taste-which also contributes to marginalization. However, these are films of timeless quality, indeed very potent for contemporary feminist, postcolonial, and even ecocritical readings, since they bring a very original view of natural destruction and technological progress.
At the very end, let us also say that Vesna Ljubić’s work is endangered even on the lowest level-materially. This means that the original film reels of her two feature films are currently unavailable to the institution holding the rights to them, i.e., it is currently impossible to talk about their digitization. A detailed review is given by Vuković, but here the rather complicated situation can be summarized, without pointing fingers, as follows. Films made in Yugoslavia underwent various post production stages in different cities, mostly Belgrade or Zagreb, which had the necessary technology. After the dissolution of Yugoslavia, however, the originals remained only in the Yugoslav Film Archive (Belgrade), while the other materials remained “scattered” between Yugoslav cities. The rights holder, the Sarajevo Film Center, does not possess the originals, and it seems unlikely that, without significant financial investment it will be able to obtain them. Furthermore, the Bosnian-Herzegovinian archive suffered serious devastation during and after the war, due to which existing tapes were damaged by moisture and mold. Although there are indications that the films of the first Bosnian female director will be prioritized for digitization, no concrete plans exist yet.Let this text, apart from the necessary reminder of a great and unjustly forgotten artist, be an appeal that urgent measures are taken to preserve her work, because otherwise, damage could be irreversible.