Bosnia and Herzegovina / All works
Cinema
Major Bauk
Nikola Popović · 1951
Synopsis
During the Second World War, in south-eastern Bosnia, the partisans stand firm against the terror of the Italian fascists and the Chetniks. At the centre of the film stands Major Bauk, an old underground fighter, a relentless adversary of the Germans and the Chetniks, whose fearlessness has become legend. Around him revolve Marija and Miloš Bauk, a schoolteacher, villagers and a young courier. The story, told in the past tense, makes of this fighter a mythical figure rather than a mere soldier.
Context
Regarded as the first fiction feature film of Bosnian cinema, the film was produced by Bosna Film from a screenplay by Branko Ćopić, with music by Fran Lhotka, and runs close to two hours. The same pair had already made, in 1947, the first Croatian feature film after the war. The critic Mirza Skenderagić sees in it a sad partisan tale about mythical heroes and invincible legends, akin to Citizen Kane, and the weekly Vreme notes its narrative constructed as a memory.
Who it is for
For those interested in the beginnings of Bosnian cinema and in the partisan film, a founding genre of Yugoslavia.
Prizes and reception
The first Bosnian fiction film, it opened the 2020 season of cult films at the Valter cinema in Sarajevo.