The Man Who Could Not Remain Silent

CinemaSerf

2025-01-23T18:26:06Z

This is quite a tensely shot short drama that depicts a scene on a train that has been stopped on it's journey through Bosnia by a paramilitary gang seeking Muslims. They are polite enough to the "brother" passengers whose papers they inspect, but "Milan" (Silvio Mumelaš) in one carriage has no papers and is terrified. His fellow travellers offer him some comfort and one, the retired captain "Tomo" (Dragan Mićanović) sticks his neck out when they try to remove the man from their compartment. When the train eventually moves on, fellow passenger and family man "Dragan" (Goran Bogdan) wonders if he, too, ought to have done more. The Balkan conflict of the early 1990s has been largely forgotten by us now, so this is quite a poignant reminder of the cruelties of ethnic cleansing enforced during a brutal war that saw the rule of law abandoned and the rule of a vengeful few capitalise on the fears of the general population to impose their will.