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History · ·4 min read

Sarajevo — the Nadrealisti showed a war starting inside one apartment, and that is what happened

In the 1991 third season, the Nadrealisti compressed the Yugoslav collapse into a single Sarajevo apartment. The Popušlić family — a mother, a father, two sons, and a student lodger — all voted for different nationalist parties in the multiparty elections. Then the war started inside the apartment. European observers arrived, declared a ceasefire, and confiscated the vases. Handžar's thesis calls it the sketch that showed 'how people can, due to a lack of rational thinking, turn to fight against their own family.'

By Nedim Hadzimahmutovic · Sarajevo

The third and final season of Top Lista Nadrealista, filmed in 1991, contained several sketches that would later be read as prophecy. The Sarajevo Wall sketch predicted the partition. The hepek offered an imaginary cure for nationalism that nobody took. But the sketch that most directly compressed the mechanism of the Yugoslav collapse into a single legible image was “Rat u familiji Popušlić” (War in the Popušlić Family).

The setup

The sketch opens with a newsreader, Nenad Janković, reporting that in the City of Sarajevo there are 673,323 fronts, and that in Yugoslavia there is harmonious war, and that he himself is endangered. The scene cuts to a reporter entering a Sarajevo apartment building under fire — smoke visible, gunshots audible — to visit the Popušlić family (Handžar, 2020, p. 75).

At the entrance, an armed man, Zenit Đozić, asks the reporter where he is from and whether he is armed. Inside, a mother, the only woman in the sketch, has been waiting. Across a hallway, her husband stands in a bunker made of furniture. Her son Denza (Dražen Janković) is a railway worker. A student lodger occupies the children’s room (Handžar, 2020, p. 75).

What happened to the family

The war in the Popušlić apartment started, the sketch explains, because of different political preferences. After the multiparty elections (the first non-Communist elections in Bosnia, held in November 1990), the family members voted for different parties. Each party represented a national faction. The family, which had lived together for 45 years under socialist Yugoslavia, now discovered that “they all voted for their own” and nobody was left for those who had governed for the previous 45 years (Handžar, 2020, p. 76).

The mother, at the end, asks for the remaining rooms (“the SAO children’s room”), using the acronym for Srpska autonomna oblast (Serbian Autonomous Region), the entities that began forming in 1991 as the first step toward the Bosnian Serb separatist project. Handžar notes the association was “truly deadly accurate, especially because nationalists had already begun to slowly carve up BiH” (Handžar, 2020, p. 75).

The European observers

The sketch does not stop at the family. Two observers from Europe arrive (their dialogue is given to Davor Dujmović) and they sit at the table, declare a ceasefire, and begin confiscating damaged items: paintings, lamps, vases. When the family members start celebrating the ceasefire, Dujmović’s character says: “Yes, they sang ‘Srbijo moja, Bosno moja, lijepa zemlja, Hrvatska’…” and the family breaks into Tomo Zdravković’s song “Hej Branka”, which the observers join (Handžar, 2020, p. 76).

The association is pointed: Zdravković’s song — a love ballad about a breakup — had, by 1991, become legible as a metaphor for the dissolution of Yugoslavia. The observers who arrive, declare peace, and then join in the singing of a breakup ballad are, in the sketch’s reading, the Benelux countries whose peacekeeping role in Bosnia would prove ineffective. Handžar notes that “it is very easy to conclude how the sketch’s creators predicted the poor performance of the Benelux countries, given that the well-known path of Dutch troops in BiH during the war was known to everyone”, a reference to the Dutch battalion at Srebrenica (Handžar, 2020, p. 74).

The weapon

When the family runs out of ammunition, they switch to kitchen implements: plates as throwing projectiles. The sketch notes this as an association with “the military power of the participants in the war in the former Yugoslavia” where, once conventional ammunition ran out, the fighting continued with whatever was at hand (Handžar, 2020, p. 76).

What the sketch showed

Handžar’s reading: “This sketch showed and presented all the misery of a society, a family, that suffered during the war, and how people can, due to a lack of rational thinking, turn to fight against their own family. Indeed, the horrors of propaganda from nationally-coloured parties and their ideology had already then begun to undermine the pillar of BiH society, the family” (Handžar, 2020, p. 77).

The Popušlić family sketch compressed what would happen to hundreds of thousands of Bosnian families into a single apartment. A family that had lived together for 45 years. An election that divided them by nation. A war fought with kitchen implements. Observers who arrived, confiscated the vases, and joined the singing.

All of it filmed in 1991. All of it happened in 1992.

Sources

  • Erol Handžar, Top lista nadrealista kao medijski fenomen subkulturnog razvoja Sarajeva i njen utjecaj na recipijente (master thesis, Faculty of Political Sciences, University of Sarajevo, 2020), pp. 75-77.
  • Vkotor (2009), Top lista nadrealista 3: Rat u familiji Popušlić — YouTube.
  • Related on this site: The Sarajevo Wall sketch, The hepek, The Nacional Detektor.

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