JOVAN RANČIĆ – A LONE WOLF OF SERBIAN CHILDREN'S FILM
Posted: Sep 30th 2008
Author: Kristina Đuković
The focus of this paper is on Jovan Rančić (1928 - 1994), the only Serbian director who had exclusively and continually been making children\'s films. His opus is made of four films: Dečak i violina (The Boy and the Violin, 1974), Poslednja trka (The Last Race, 1979), Mahovina na asfaltu (Moss on Asphalt, 1983) and Suncokreti (Sunflowers, 1988). His films are analyzed in the context of other children\'s films made in Serbia, with a stress on the films of Branko Bauer, whose films Zimovanje u Jakobsfeldu (Wintering in Jakobsfeld, 1975) and Salaš u Malom ritu (A Town in the Marshes a.k.a. The Farm in Mali Rit, 1976) continue the tradition of Serbian war films. The films of Jovan Rančić are an isolated phenomenon within Serbian cinematography, and reasons for that are found in a number of factors, including economical and cultural. Rančić\'s poetics is, in its essence, pedagogically oriented, but with a humanism whose scope and relevance are much wider. This enabled numerous awards at foreign film festivals and distribution abroad, but in his native country his work remained neglected and without any real successors. This paper attempts to revalue Rančić\'s work by placing it in its context and also to map possible routes for the future Serbian films for children.
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