Mladen Miljanović: The Final Battle

The Final Battle by artist Mladen Miljanović is a feature-length film whose plot revolves around four teams in charge of a film audition. What connects these four groups is the fact that they are direct or indirect participants in the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Among them are veterans, disabled war veterans and civilian victims, and the project they are casting actors for is a fictional action war film. Basing their qualifications on the lived experience of war victims or members of their families, an anti-heroic narrative emerges that perceives war as a loss rather than a victory. The imaginary casting thus becomes a social experiment in which a seemingly typical film audition turns into an unexpected lesson about war and its incomprehensible horrors.

Methodologically experimental, and subversive in the way it involves part of the acting crew, The Final Battle tells numerous personal stories connected to the war, and raises questions about the culture of violence and the cinematic staging of war in contemporary Western culture. In doing so, the Bosnian perspective and its conflicting relations from the 1990s become the backbone of the narrative, while direct experience of trauma grows into a brutal call for sobering reflection and objectivity.

The film portrays war victims and their families with their individual stories. Their scale, the level of social devastation and the breadth of trauma permeate the social fabric and leave no one indifferent. First-person documentary testimonies, overlaid with the stylized fiction of a potential feature film, intensify the impression of the difficult everyday life of post-war societies and of those currently affected by war. National enthusiasm and patriotic euphoria are thus deconstructed to their very foundations, while questions about the motives for waging war and the willingness to sacrifice one's life or part of one's body stir confusion and a sense of paradox in viewers.

After the screening, there will be a conversation with the author, Mladen Miljanović, and film participants Zlatan Kovačević and Sabahudin Hodžić. The same evening will also feature a concert by Damir Avdić Graha, whose music appears in the film.

The event is realized with the support of the Foundation for Arts Initiatives in New York.