After a campaign on social media and calls for protests, a cinema in the Montenegrin capital Podgorica cancelled the screening of a Serbian historical drama about the World War II royalist Chetnik movement.
The Cineplexx cinema in Montenegrin capital Podgorica said on Friday that it will not now be showing the film ‘Surrounded’, about a World War II Serb Chetnik leader, Nikola Kalabic, after campaigners on social media urged the cancellation of the planned screening on April 14.
“The Serbian movie will not be shown in our cinema,” Cineplexx told news website CDM.
Directed by Serbian author and publisher Miloslav Samardzic, ‘Surrounded’ is the first movie drama about the Chetnik movement in Serbia, according to the film’s website.
It focuses on Kalabic and his associates’ armed clash with German troops in Serbia in 1942. It is produced by Samardzic’s publishing house Pogledi, known around the ex-Yugoslav region for publications about the Chetnik movement.
The Chetniks represented Serbian royalist interests during World War II but lost out to the Partisans, led by Josip Broz Tito and the Communist Party, who accused them of collaborating with Nazi occupation forces.
Kalabic was the commander of a Chetnik unit called the Mountain Guard Corps. After his death in1946, he was declared a “national enemy” by a Yugoslav court. The circumstances of his death have never been established.
In May 2017, a Serbian court in the city of Valjevo rehabilitated Kalabic, but in May 2018, Belgrade Appeals Court asked for the case to be reviewed to determine whether or not Kalabic participated in war crimes.
According to Serbia’s Law on Rehabilitation, someone who committed or participated in war crimes does not have the right to rehabilitation.
Samardzic said in June last year that the movie should present the Chetniks as an anti-fascist movement. He said it was being funded by people in the Serb diaspora around the world.
“We are trying to rely as much as possible on our people who have emigrated who are in the film industry. We have a lot of descendants of Chetniks who are in the film industry and who were ready to help us,” Samardzic told Pogledi, a magazine owned by his publishing house.
In 2016, the Montenegrin government banned Ravna Gora Chetnik Movement, claiming it promote radical ideologies and ethnic hatred.
Each August in the village of Gornje Zaostro near the town of Berane, pro-Serb organisations honour Pavle Djurisic, a former officer in the army of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and one of Chetnik leader Dragoljub ‘Draza’ Mihailovic’s closest associates.
In 2003, a memorial to Djurisic was erected in Zaostro but because it was built without permission, the state authorities removed it.
Riot police were deployed during the removal of the memorial because of fears of possible violence amid strong opposition from Djurisic’s supporters.
Chetnik gatherings have also been controversial in neighbouring Bosnia and Herzegovina, where three members of the Ravna Gora Movement, a Chetnik organisation, were acquitted in December of inciting ethnic and religious hatred at a uniform-clad rally in the town of Visegrad. Their annual gathering was banned by police this year.