- They signed up for battle in the movie, and got an unexpectedly brutal lesson about conflict. They certainly, but so do we who watch it.
- The film project FINAL BATTLE, both in reality and in its ultimate film form, begins with a trailer-casting call. It is a casting that in the most clichéd Hollywood manner heralds the highest-grossing Blockbuster film about The Final Battle. After the Battle of Cannae (216 BC), the Crusade with Saladin at Hattin (1187), the Battle of Waterloo (1815), the Battle of Stalingrad (1942) and now at the beginning of the 21st century, not the biggest but THE FINAL BATTLE. Animated and full text enumerates the battles but also small places in Bosnia and Herzegovina, 4 of them, Bihac, Trebinje, Bijeljina and Doboj, where the casting for the actors in this film will turn out to be an imaginary film will take place.
- This film measures the pulse of post-conflict society in an ethically questionable way at a time when the war in Ukraine and Middle East in the public sphere normalizes accelerated militarization and expanded conflict as the only solution. That spiral of violence becomes elusive for any purposeful artistic articulation, but also the challenge that this film sets before itself. It comes as a need for a reaction by the author and the society from which he comes, to use an experiential example in the form of a film to try to warn about the normalization of conflict and militarization in the media and political discourse of the time in which we live.
The film project FINAL BATTLE, both in reality and in its ultimate film form, begins with a trailer-casting call. It is a casting that in the most clichéd Hollywood manner heralds the highest-grossing Blockbuster film about The Final Battle. After the Battle of Cannae (216 BC), the Crusade with Saladin at Hattin (1187), the Battle of Waterloo (1815), the Battle of Stalingrad (1942) and now at the beginning of the 21st century, not the biggest but THE FINAL BATTLE! Animated and full text enumerates the battles but also small places in Bosnia and Herzegovina, 4 of them, Bihac, Trebinje, Bijeljina and Doboj, where the casting for the actors in this film will turn out to be an imaginary film will take place.
The trailer as a casting call was shown on local televisions, web portals, social networks as an official casting call in all of the listed small towns where a local jury was selecting the actors for this grandiose wartime film. The unexpected surprise that all those who apply were faced and appear at the casting were not the roles they are supposed to play (the soldier who lost his leg in a minefield, the wife who was informed that her husband was killed, the child who in the hospital without oxygen suffering from cerebral palsy or soldier in trench who celebrate with wooden gun news that war is over) but jury itself. A situation of moral, ethical, but also emotional dilemmas occurs at the very moment when they realize that the jury at the casting is composed only of war invalids, mother who were left without a husband in the war of the 90s, or when one of the castings take place directly in the home of the refugee family of a 33-year-old boy who, due to the lack of oxygen in the incubator after his birth in 1992 at the beginning of the war, fell ill with cerebral palsy.
This sobering moment in the film puts in a dilemma those who are attracted by the bombastic media trailer, the movie title and the desire for a cinematic or realistic simulation of war and violence. Confronting the "actors" of real violence calls into question their motives but also directly confronts them with real trauma. THE FINAL BATTLE becomes a dead end with no return, but not for those who lose their lives in it, but only for those who continue to live with the burden of trauma and the experience of violence. Here, the film deals with trauma, but according to the traumatized actors, it has a therapeutic effect because their participation as testimony acts as the most effective deterrent from violence and conflict.
There FINAL BATTLE is not an experimental film, but more film as a social experiment that intervenes in reality on the margins of Europe, which is gradually but surely being militarized. Method of "twisted socks" approach in this work begins the story of the conflict inspired by its end: That day in Dayton, and on the dark night in Bosnia when the peace agreement was signed, the entire sky was lit up above the front line. It was lit up with bullets and flare shells and other munitions as both opposing sides shot themselves in the air with happiness that the war was over on paper...
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