As a kid, Igor Drljača could never get through the New Year’s Eve screening of 2001: A Space Odyssey that a local Toronto television station would play before midnight in the 90s.
“I remember, vividly, always trying to finish this film …. I could just never get through it because I would fall asleep,” he laughed.
That was until Drljača spent New Year’s Eve at a family friend’s place when he was 11 and he had managed to stay awake and watch the film’s entire 2 hour and 15 minute runtime.
“I was blown away by [the] completely different form or approach to storytelling than your conventional sort of films at the time, or even today — cinema that was more interested in the human experience, as opposed to entertaining you.”
Drljača, an associate professor in film production at UBC, was born in Sarajevo in modern-day Bosnia and Herzegovina while it was still part of Yugoslavia. He grew up in a mixed Serbian-Bosniak household and more broadly, a cultural, religious and political climate of looming tension.
“There was always this kind of interesting dichotomy of what identity meant in that context,” he said. “And I didn't really understand what that was until the war really started.”
When the Yugoslav Wars, a series of separate, but connected conflicts in the region, broke out in 1991, Drljača, his mother and brother were quick to leave, meandering around the Balkans to try to get to family in Germany.
They eventually wound up in Toronto.
“I was definitely informed by the war and the refugee experience, spending a year on the road … never having a place to call home for more than a month or two,” he said. “I don't know if I ever thought of myself as a storyteller at the time, the storytelling and film were something that I was always moved by, or gravitated towards."
"I got very easily bored by conventional storytelling.”
“And I got very easily bored by conventional storytelling.”
His fascination for film and a drive to challenge its standard formula led Drljača to York University, where he received his master’s in film production in 2011. But even before this stage of his career, he sought out different forms of art like drawing and music as “self-healing.”
“I think trauma, in some ways, was a huge factor that was never fully processed,” he said. “And a lot of the topics that I was dealing with in my filmmaking also were directly tied to some of those experiences in former Yugoslavia, in [Sarajevo] in particular.”
Drljača’s Woman in Purple (2010) is reminiscent of those themes. The short-film centres on a young Sarajevo orphan who works with a local drug dealer to earn easy money, but becomes painfully aware of his actions when he is dispatched on a job one day, leading to a chance encounter.
Somewhere along this exploration of upbringing under Bosnia’s conditions, Drljača wondered what would have happened to the Woman in Purple’s protagonist if he continued on this same path. This vision would materialize over a decade later in his coming-of-age romance The White Fortress (2021), which was featured in the Toronto International Film Festival Canada’s Top 10 selection that same year.
The film follows Faruk, an orphan who lives with his ill grandmother and forages for scraps in the rundown Sarajevo suburb of Alipasino Polje, who meets quiet, sheltered and affluent Mona. The two find refuge from their own polarizing worlds in their budding friendship, though the socio-political class tensions of the time should have hindered their paths from crossing.
Drljača said The White Fortress was developed from his interest in the “extremes” that emerged in post-war Bosnia — the extremely wealthy and the extremely poor — as to analyze inequality and how some of the region, namely communist-era blocks, are slowly being gentrified.
“There's just all this human trauma of having experienced that war that's going to be embedded in society for a long time and that made me think about making a film about youth there,” said Drljača.
“I was always fascinated by the way Bosnia is being used, almost as an experiment, to create something new, whereas the old ideas and ideologies are still present, and it's kind of fascinating watching how those interact,” Drljača added.
“It's like both realities can exist at the same time.”
“It's like both realities can exist at the same time.”
Exploring intergenerational and intersectional identity and a state of betweenness comes up often in Drljača’s work. In films like Krivina (2012), Drljača depicts a common immigrant experience of revisiting the past, stepping from a space of calm to familiar chaos. At a time when media literacy seems to be waning but is still crucial to appreciating and understanding the intention of cinema and reclaiming art from powerful figures, tackling complex topics is something Drljača challenges his film production students at UBC to do.
For Drljača, critically engaging with film is not just about being taken aback by cinematic b-rolls and convincing dialogue — it’s also about how a story is told and how fiction is used to expose truth, a skill he developed when telling his stories became less about being the one manoeuvring the lens and more about his directorial style.
“If I'm just giving you a pretty shot, then I'm just hypnotizing you to the fact that this might be something that I'm trying to get you to buy into. But if I'm a bit more conservative with what I show, or allow you to imagine what could be on the other side of the frame, I'm trying to have a relationship with the audience."
“If I'm just giving you a pretty shot, then I'm just hypnotizing you to the fact that this might be something that I'm trying to get you to buy into. But if I'm a bit more conservative with what I show, or allow you to imagine what could be on the other side of the frame, I'm trying to have a relationship with the audience,” he said.
“There's never been a more important moment in time than today to really be aware of how image is constructed, how images are manipulated, and how easy it is to reclaim an alleged truth.”
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