In November 1996, my mother, grandma and I were excitedly chanting „Bando crevna“ (Red gangsters!) during the mass anti-Milošević protests in Belgrade. I was 8 at the time and was mesmerised by the thrill, energy and fun that were on the street of Belgrade for those few months after the contested election. There was a mini-renaissance or music and art happening on the streets, a great change compared to the drabness of Belgrade between 1992 and 1994, as well as the silly and stiff aesthetic of the official media at the time.  

Moreover, a sensitive and intense only child, I felt happy to be an honorary adult, to be fighting for what the most important people in my life thought was a good worthy cause and I was getting hooked on the sense of my and my family’s silly sense of moral superiority.

In those heady days, if somebody told us that almost exatly 27 years alter, the son of the Milošević’s culture minister, Vladimir Perišić, will package our protests for a foreign audience in a staid, infantile film in which children of high ranking party apparatchiks are the ultimate victims, and be praised for it by our then-co protestors, we would have been disgusted.

Twenty seven years later, weaning from my self-righteousness, I find that fact very illuminating about how politics and culture work and actually artistically exciting.

But before digressing, for those reading this for a review of Lost Country, the film, I would like to say that the film is the epitome of the Serbian export-oriented cottage industry of Stiftungskunst, didactic socially engaged art supported by various Western state affiliated institutions to “deal with the past”.

From the casting of Jasna Đuričić (excellent) and Boris Isaković (hammy), of the recent Quo vaids Aida hype, through to the obligatory blue-tinted Eastern European miserabilism which depicts the affluent area of Vračar as a poverty stricken communist hellscape where children have to enter schools through windows, all the way to the inelegant shoehorning of all things Westerns „know“ about the recent history of the region (Kosovo! Sarajevo! War!) into a primarily Belgrade social drama and addition of the “moral magical minority” character, the film is bureaucratic, by- the-numbers “art”, as much as the press releases of the Milošević era were “journalism”. What is good is that the film is shortish, and the premise of the story – tracking the struggles of a scion of a regime family in the time of protests, loosely based on its director/screenwriter’s experience, has a lot of potential. It is a shame that any real insight or point is replaced by banal sentimentalism and strict adherence to depicting Serbia of 1990s in the strict Stiftungskunst manner, which seems to be the director’s forte (or at least bread and butter) from the beginning of his career. Thus you get zingers such as “It is better to have AIDS than live in Serbia”, that Yugoslavia “is just like North Korea” and finally a premonition by the “magical minority pixie dream girl” that a cop will kill Albanian civilians a few years later.

But again, if you like studies of elites and artists during social upheavals, you will be disappointed by the film, but will be intrigued by the fact that production of by-the- numbers propaganda, whether funded by the Yugoslav state or EU country funds, stayed in the hands of the same family.

It is here that Lost country approaches the great social autopsies of Balzac, Proust and Tomasi di Lampedusa.

Watching the all to brief part of the film where the Stefan, the adolescent protagonist, defends his mommy dearest against his friends and a pompous literature professor, I was thrilled if the director will make the point known to all nepo-babies that, superficial values, aesthetics and politics aside, family (business) is family (business) and that his communist-patrician family is still on the top of the pecking order, and that he will do anything to keep it there.

In a society that has always heavily relied on family ties, even outside the notoriously nepotistic cultural industry, that is an obvious point and that to protect your family and its interests, you occasionally have (to appear) to go against it. For example, often cited trope that, during WWII families had one son with the communists and the other one with the royalists, shows smart familial risk management in an environment where ideological purity has always been trumped by familial ties. Similarly, if you wanted to be an influential family in the cultural milieu in Milošević’s Serbia you had to be against the protests, and now, twenty seven years later, you have to idolise them and shoehorn stories about killed Albanian civilians. As Tomasi di Lampedusa quote goes “Everything has to change so everything can remain the same”.

Nepotism in culture, despite its unpopularity, can be a force for good. It serve as protection against didactic political “art”, as nepobabies are people of independent means. For example, Sofia Coppola – as pointed out recently on Red Scare – can produced layered and beautiful films about women and well to do parts of the society precisely because she does not have to toe the ideological line in depiction of sexual and social relations. Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa himself benefited greatly from being an heir to a grand Sicilian family, which allowed him both insight into the world of high aristocracy and means to pursue a career in the arts. It is a tragedy in Serbia that nepotism gets wasted on people who tend to draw zero insight from their peculiar positions and use them for the (artistic) good, but try to keep their positions by constantly portraying themselves as vicitims and throwing their country under the bus.

I will hold no breath for it, but it would be great if Perišić made a Proustian sequel of sorts, set twenty years later, where his protagonist finds himself as a film director beloved by local pro-Western art fund keepers, while his friends, who were against Milošević in their youth, slave away in call centres for miserable pay, while being branded regressive uncultured fascists for wondering if really those Anti-Milošević protests of their youth changed much. He could call it Country regained.   

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