Sarajevo on film 2014 Serbia
The Man Who Defended Gavrilo Princip (Branio sam Mladu Bosnu)
The courtroom drama of Rudolf Zistler — the lawyer who took the defence of Princip and Young Bosnia, and the system that tried to make him not bother.
- Director
- Srđan Koljević
- Year
- 2014
- Language
- Serbian
- Country
- Serbia
- Genre
- historical, courtroom, drama
The Man Who Defended Gavrilo Princip (Branio sam Mladu Bosnu, “I defended Young Bosnia”) is the film of the trial that followed the shots at the Latin Bridge — and of the man who took the losing side. Rudolf Zistler was an Austrian lawyer who agreed to defend Gavrilo Princip and the Young Bosnians at their 1914 trial in Sarajevo, in a legal system that had already decided the verdict, at a moment when defending the assassins made him an enemy of his own empire. The film is his story: the pressure to refuse, the trial itself, and the question of what a defence means when the state wants a show trial.
Srđan Koljević directed it in 2014, on the centenary, from the perspective of the trial rather than the assassination — a courtroom drama in which the accused are young Bosnians and the court is the apparatus of the empire they had shot. It is the film that asks the question the assassination films usually skip: what did it cost the one Austrian who did his job properly?
For a visitor, it pairs with the 1914 corner and the centenary film as the legal afterword — the story of what happened to the conspirators after the photographs, and of the lawyer who refused to let the empire’s revenge be a formality.
Critical reception
No English-language critical reviews or aggregate scores exist for the film — its Rotten Tomatoes page carries no critic reviews — and its record is limited to its 2014 premiere. Serbian-language coverage is the primary record of its reception.
Public reception and legacy
Released for the centenary of the assassination, the film was supported by the Film Center of Serbia and was later re-cut into a four-episode television series broadcast by RTS, Serbia’s state broadcaster, in 2015. No English-language critical record or aggregate score exists.