film.
DADA: A Defiant Witness
On a fateful day, an investigative journalist risks everything to expose the criminal powerbrokers behind the Yugoslav wars, even as the walls close in around her.
inspired by a true story
POLITICAL THRILLER DRAMA (107’) language SERBIAN + ENGLISH
a film by ELIZABETA BETINSKI
featuring HANA SELIMOVIĆ
executive producers VLADIMIR DEKIĆ, LOWELL BERGMAN
screenplay ELIZABETA BETINSKI, VUK BOŠKOVIĆ, HANA SELIMOVIĆ
director of photography DAVID MCFARLAND
In a time marked by relentless attacks on independent journalism, DADA: A Defiant Witness tells the true story of Dada Vujasinović, a journalist who stood up to power when it was most dangerous to do so. Suspenseful and haunting, the film explores journalistic ethics and integrity while affirming the enduring power of truth to shape collective memory — and conscience. Anchored in Dada’s final day, April 7, 1994, the film unfolds through historical record and Dada’s own words, drawn from her intimate letters. Over the course of the day, Dada moves through a city transformed by the violent breakup of Yugoslavia: danger lurks in every hallway, every phone call, every glance on the street. She has uncovered corruption entwining government, organized crime, and paramilitary forces. Her reporting challenges the narratives of the powerful, provoking the wrath of those operating in the shadows. As her final hours unfold, the film weaves a portrait of Dada’s remarkable character: her steadfast commitment to truth and justice that made her a target, the quiet moments of vulnerability that reveal her humanity, and the clarity with which she held a mirror to power. In bearing witness to Dada’s life and work, DADA: A Defiant Witness affirms that journalism remains one of the strongest defenses of a free society and that the responsibility to carry it forward now rests with us.
WITHOUT INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM, THERE IS NO DEMOCRACY.
WITHOUT A FREE PRESS, THERE IS NO FREEDOM.
Teaser Reel
SPOMEN
spȍmēn (m. inan.; Cyrillic: спо̏ме̄н)
remembrance, memory; act of recalling
a documentary film about what we leave behind
and what refuses to leave us
FEATURE-LENGTH DOCUMENTARY FILM language, main: ENGLISH VO
a film by ELIZABETA BETINSKI
producer VLADIMIR DEKIĆ
director of photography DAVID MCFARLAND
original score OZREN K. GLASER
• FILM DECK
There is a photograph taken sometime in the early 1980s. A class of Yugoslav schoolchildren stands in front of a monument so large and so strange it looks like it arrived from another planet. The children are looking at the camera, not at the monument. One of them is me. I left Yugoslavia in 1993, alone, as a brutal civil war tore my country apart, obliterating it from the maps. The monuments I had visited as a child on school excursions — enormous, abstract, unlike anything else on earth — receded into the distance along with everything else I had left behind. Then, some thirty years later, the internet found them. To the world encountering Spomeniks for the first time, they were mysterious, futuristic, otherworldly. They circulated as images, beautiful and enigmatic, almost entirely detached from the history of the ground they stand on. To me their viral resurgence meant something else entirely: a language I already knew suddenly being mispronounced by everyone. SPOMEN is a documentary of return to a place that no longer exists, a film about what we leave behind and what refuses to leave us.
WHY NOW?
Can monuments hold the story of a nation even when the nation itself has vanished? Do they still mean something without anyone left to tend to that meaning? Should they remain in the face of contested histories, or is their beauty enough to keep them standing? Who gets to decide? These questions have never been more urgent. We live in a time of mass displacement, of wars that erase cities overnight, of communities scattered across the world. At the same time, the monuments we’ve built to hold our histories are themselves being questioned, removed or reinterpreted, their meaning disputed and their future uncertain. Spomeniks stand at the center of that tension. Built to commemorate the anti-fascist struggle of WWII, they now exist without the country that made them, suspended between memory and abandonment, history and aesthetics. But Spomeniks are not only remnants of a lost nation: they are concrete embodiments of an anti-fascist history that, with fascism and authoritarianism on the rise again across the world, is no longer contained in the past.