On Sunday, 23 August, Pjaceta Festival Square hosted the world premiere of the documentary ‘Vjesnik – The Final Edition’, directed by Dražen Klarić. A large audience followed the story of the fall of a journalistic giant and of an era, its people and a society that changed alongside Vjesnik.
Just nine months after the fire and one month after the Vjesnik tower was demolished, Dražen Klarić, editor-in-chief and managing director of Večernji list, and producer and co-screenwriter Petra Balija presented a film that goes beyond the story of a single building. The documentary portrays an entire era in journalism, from Vjesnik’s rise to its fall, while the fire marks the final and, for many, painful act of that period.
Klarić explained that the film explores what Vjesnik was, what it meant to people and its role in the development of journalism. The story is told from two perspectives: that of a new generation of Večernji list journalists and that of the people who built Vjesnik, whose workforce once numbered six thousand.
‘There is no reason to fear for the future, because even today there are young people who understand that a journalist’s duty is to help build a genuinely better society’, Klarić concluded.
Petra Balija explained that the film was created segment by segment, as the Vjesnik tower was demolished floor by floor. The creative team had to condense hours of stories and testimonies into around fifty minutes, although almost every segment could have become a film in its own right. In addition to Klarić and Balija, Boris Rašeta worked on the screenplay, while Anđela Bučić served as director of photography and editor. The film features a number of well-known figures whose lives were intertwined with Vjesnik in different ways: Mirko Galić, Ružica Cigler, Branko Tuđen, Snježana Banović, Ninoslav Pavić, Marijana Grbeša and others.
RAFF director Robert Tomić Zuber stressed that Vjesnik, an important part of Croatian society and journalism history, must be preserved in a lasting record. Under the slogan ‘Truth Needs Audience’, RAFF connects documentary and investigative film with journalism, making it a natural venue for the premiere. Večernji list, the documentary’s producer, has been the festival’s media partner for six years.
