Son Of Hero In Oscar-Nominated Film Dies On Eve Of Academy Awards

The makers of the Oscar-nominated live action short The Man Who Could Not Remain Silent have reason both to celebrate and to mourn.

The film, which tells the true story of Tomo Buzov, a Croatian man who stood up for Bosnian Muslim passengers who were pulled from a train in 1993 in a horrifying act of ethnic cleansing, won Best Short Fiction Film Friday night at the César Awards in Paris, France’s equivalent of the Oscars. But only a day earlier, filmmakers learned that Buzov’s son – who had been instrumental in allowing the film to be made – died suddenly of a heart attack in Belgrade, Serbia. He was 52. Darko Buzov’s death came on the 32^nd anniversary of his father’s heroic actions during the brutal civil war in the former Yugoslavia.

On the cold morning of February 27, 1993, Tomo Buzov boarded train 671 in Belgrade, heading to visit his son Darko in Montenegro. In his compartment were several people including a teenager of Bosnian Muslim background. As the train wound through Eastern Bosnia, it suddenly ground to a halt near the village of Štrpci. Armed members of a Serbian-aligned militia boarded the train and went through the cars, hunting for any Bosnian Muslims on board. When they reached Buzov’s compartment, they demanded identity documents from the Muslim youth.

Buzov “told the Muslim boy, still underage, to sit down, and stood up instead of him,” according to an account published last June by NIN, a Serbian magazine. “[The militia] told him three times to sit back down, he refused.”

To the armed men who demanded to know who he was, Buzov replied that he was a Yugoslav and a former army officer in the JNA, the Yugoslav National Army. His I.D. showed that he was a Croat (therefore, not a Bosnian Muslim). On that day in February 1993 the militia dragged 18 Bosnian Muslim men and Buzov from the train and executed them. Their remains were never found. Buzov was the only non-Muslim seized, and the only one of 500 passengers on the train who had stood up to defend innocent Muslims on board.

Actor Dragan Mićanović plays Buzov in the film written and directed by Nebojša Slijepčević. The filmmaker made the key creative choice to focus not so much on Buzov, but on others in the train compartment with him – especially a man played by actor Goran Bogdan who seems resolved to stick up for the imperiled Bosnian passenger, but in the end keeps quiet. The characters other than Buzov, though fictionalized, are based on actual court transcripts.

“I read more than a thousand pages of different documents of interviews with people who were on that train,” Slijepčević has said. “I read testimonies from the trial — because one of the killers from the train was caught back in ’90s and he was put on trial. So, there were firsthand testimonies by many people who lost their relatives or were just passengers on the train. The script is fictionalized in a way; the Tomo Buzov character is real, but the other characters are not real but are inspired by real experiences of the people from the train. And most of the lines that are spoken in the film I have found in these transcripts.”

Slijepčević told Deadline it was critical to receive permission from Darko Buzov to make the narrative. “I wrote him that we want to make a film where an actor will play the role of his father,” he said. “He was very generous… He offered his help, and it was very important for me. Without his permission, I’m 100 percent sure that we would not make this film.”

If The Man Who Could Not Remain Silent wins tonight it would bring the first Academy Award to Slijepčević and producer Danijel Pek. The 14-minute-long film previsiously won the European Film Award and the Palme d’or for short film at the Cannes Film Festival. Moments after winning the award in Cannes, Slijepčević called Darko Buzov and told him, “I dedicate this film to your father.”

Darko told NIN magazine last June, “My condition about the film was that there should be no political background, and that the film should make clear that my father was not taken and killed by the Serbs because he was a Croat, but because they told him to keep quiet and he refused. Everybody on that train, 500 of them, kept their eyes on the floor and stayed silent in front of 20 uniformed hooligans of Milan Lukić and his paramilitary unit ‘Otpisani’.”

Tomo Buzov was killed at age 53, making him a year older at death than his son Darko.

Darko told NIN, “I have never felt the desire for revenge. Revenge is never sweet; it always drags you into something even darker. Nor have I felt hatred. The way and the reason why my father is gone brings a feeling of peace, a feeling that perhaps, that was supposed to happen, for a younger life to be saved, an older one was sacrificed of his own free will. I would do the same now.”