First Day of Peace

Ourspacemovieblog recently sat down with filmmaker Mirko Rucnov (M.F.A. in Film '09, Columbia University) to discuss his short film, First Day of Peace. First Day of Peace was the recipient of a development award selected by Killer Films and was a Faculty Selects film at the 2009 Columbia University Film Festival. Excerpts from that conversation follow.

Synopsis of First Day of Peace: When a peace agreement is announced, a middle-aged peasant undertakes a voyage to the disputed Bosnian border to plow his land. His decision brings unexpected results…

Michael Fishman for Ourspacemovieblog (MF): First Day of Peace is about war but it refrains from making an obvious statement about war.

Mirko Rucnov (MR): Yes, I didn’t want to make too obvious of a statement. Art as a form of propaganda, political or social, never was an interest of mine because the possibilities are very limited. Such films grow stale and after the passage of time, they are usually forgotten.

MF: Although, obviously, you are making some kind of statement about war.

MR: I’m not against statements, only ones that are expository or preachy. Every piece of art is a statement; what would be the point of making anything (otherwise)? So it’s a certain point-of-view. It’s impossible to be objective about reality. Each of us tells a story from our own experience and through our own eyes.

MF: What inspired the story?

MR: The story was loosely inspired by a true event of a peasant who was shot on his land during the seize fire agreement. When I wrote the script, it all came in one piece, it was not pre-constructed in any way. I just wrote it in one flow, one very emotional flow, that was basically the whole story. Later, I re-wrote it, which is always the case, but the basic core remained from that first draft. Because this is the first day of peace, the first day of a peace agreement, what was interesting to me was the notion of how the war changes then, because you know, in war, during war time, everything is simple in people’s minds; that’s why war is so horrifying: we are right, they are wrong, they are the enemies of peace. I wanted to show that the danger is still there and that it’s anonymous; it could come from either side, from your own side or the other side. Like friendly fire, both sides firing their guns in victory, you don’t know when or from where danger is still coming, even though technically it is a time of peace. I wanted to express that aspect of
transitional limbo between war and peace.

MF: Did you make any changes to the story during production?

MR: I had some scenes that I left out of the movie because they would have made it too long. I had one scene that I really liked set in an abandoned village with a little boy, but I wanted to keep the movie at 15 minutes. And there were some scenes that were added during the re-write that were never actually filmed. But nothing was left out that would compromise the story itself, which I feel very fortunate about.

MF: Was most of your crew from Bosnia?

MR: My crew was from all over the place. The main producer was my sister Sonja Rucnov. My Columbia University fellow student Shrihari Sathe was co-producer along with me, and my friend and partner in Plowshare Films Geoff Bailey was AD and associate producer. The cinematographer Rolf Dekens and gaffer Luuk Zonnenberg came from Holland. The AC Thomas Fishwick came from England, and sound man Tim Korn along with my Columbia friends fellow students Erik Pagan and Bob Snow arrived from the USA. Also, I used people from the village I know for additional crew and as actors. This eclectic mixture of people miraculously worked as one in spite of the language barrier. Both sides, local and foreign, went through great and life changing experiences... It was amazing to be a part of it... To illustrate this, I want to paraphrase the words of Mico Bakic, who was my right hand man in organizing the shoot; he said: “After this experience, I will never watch movies with the same eyes.” It was like an epiphany to him, what amount of risk goes into the making of a movie, and how people can do anything if they’re grouped around one strong idea.

MF: Were any of the cast actual actors?

MR: No, they were all from the village. From when I first wrote the script I knew I would use real people because you cannot pull this off without real people, it would be artificial. These people work on the land all their lives and it comes natural to them; their faces and their hands are shaped by the wind and winters, no makeup can do that. You can really sense when someone comes from a village.

MF: Like the fortune teller…

MR: Yes, she is a survivor of the Holocaust. Croatian Nazis took her eyes out when she was 14 years old by forcing her to watch fire, so her eyes just drained out. Right before this torture, she witnessed the slaughtering of her parents. But she captivated everyone in the crew with her amazing inner spirit and strength. It’s amazing to see what people can survive and still have the hope in life and see only good in people.

MF: How did you meet her? Was she someone you knew?

MR: No, actually I did not know about her. I had a fortune teller in the script but she wasn’t blind. When I was looking for an old woman to play this role, it was very hard to find someone who was ready to play the role. First of all, most non-actors are very shy, and I had to find someone who was willing to do it for free and who could act. Somebody told me about this woman, I went to meet her and she said yes. That was one of the hardest scenes to shoot. It was the first day of shooting, and it took a great deal of patience because first of all, she doesn’t know what film is. She has been blind since she was 14 years old, that happened before TV was even invented, and she lived in a village in the small hills of Bosnia all her life. They had no cinema, and she had never seen TV. She didn’t even have a concept of film. She heard about it, and TV, but she never experienced them, how they operate. I told her we were playing a game. It was kind of surreal, I couldn’t even explain that she was talking to a character in a film, not a real person.

MF: The way that she tells fortunes –

MR: She uses beans. She counts the beans and the result is a number that is interpreted according to a system.

MF: And the number that comes up is an 8.

MR: Yes, an 8, which is very bad. But the funniest thing is that every time we were shooting the scene, I tried to explain to her that she had to fake it was 8 but she couldn’t understand that, so every time she would throw the beans it would come up a good-fortune number and she couldn’t understand that she had to pretend it was an 8. So I told her it was a game and that we had to put the numbers like they were an 8, like she had thrown an 8. I had to be very patient. She really went out of her way to do this. Everyone on the crew was very touched by her.

MF: You had her remove her glasses, which was very moving.

MR: Yes, that was very emotional. That was the toughest part...

MF: So, even though Marco knows that, as she puts it, his “way is closed,” he still goes.

MR: Yes, and in the following scene where he sees his friends one of them remarks that Marco lost his only son to the war and that he has lost his mind in a way. There is no one to continue his family and he has no one to leave his land to. But it is also an act of resistance to all of this madness, the meaninglessness of war, He thinks that he can bring change by the simple act of plowing his land, as his ancestors did for centuries before; he wants to bring things back to normal. It’s almost an act of self-sacrifice. Regardless of the consequences I think he succeeds because we see the people on the other side coming out to plow their land as well, on the other side of the marker; he inspired them to come out, so there is a certain amount of harmony but not in a sentimental sense, to give them a sense of purpose in life.

MF: Did you build all of the sets, the ruins of the houses?

MR: Yes, all of the ruins were built from scratch. Most of the real ruins are overtaken by woods, so we couldn’t use them, except for the abandoned house that is filled with animals. That was an old house that belonged to cousins of mine who had built a new house, so they let me use the old house. Again, I have to say, my family and friends in Bosnia were so helpful in the making of this film.

MF: Speaking about the animals, how was it working with animals?

MR: Great. I have worked with animals before and animals are such a part of my life and my imagination since my childhood. I had no problems with them at all. They did everything I asked! (laughs) For example, the peacock jumping out of the window, that was done in one take. We tried first to have somebody push it out the window but their arm kept coming into frame, so we wound up just yelling at the bird from outside the house and the bird reacted to that and jumped out the window. And he landed perfectly, almost right at Marco’s feet, like they had some kind of connection. It was great. I couldn’t have asked for a better moment.

MF: After Marco leaves that house, he leads his horse to the field and he’s practically enveloped in the fog.

MR: Yes, he’s stepping into the fog, it’s almost like he is stepping into death, or the river Styx; there is no coming back. But I wanted to film it with a certain grace, so that it would not seem too pessimistic. Fog played a significant role visually throughout the film. We shot only limited hours a day because I wanted to capture different densities of fog, to have fog present throughout to various degrees.

MF: It feels more mystical than symbolic.

MR: I don’t like images that are too obviously symbolic; I prefer allegories. Allegories have a wider range of interpretation, I think, and are closer to life. Symbols are always narrowly defined. I like when there is more space for the viewer to think.

MF: Your use of camera feels very deliberate; you often use close-ups and then pans, for instance, in the abandoned house when you pan to the bullet holes in the wall.

MR: That was actually done in one shot, which was really a beautiful shot, but I broke it for dramatic reasons. Instead of leaving it as one continuous shot as it was filmed, I decided to break it and show Marco’s reaction. I decided that would work better for the viewer dramatically than if it were one continuous shot.

MF: Did you feel the pan as one continuous shot would have been too predictable?

MR: Yes, maybe that it would have been too obvious as a shot. But the main concern was that breaking it was more dramatic, it was more beneficial for the story.

MF: You screened First Day of Peace in Bosnia. How was it received?

MR: I just came back. I had a premiere in the village there that has a theater and everyone was very excited and happy, people were crying from the excitement. It was the hardest premiere because I wasn’t sure how they were going to react. I wanted them to react well and they did. It was very emotional, it was great. I’m proud I didn’t disappoint them.

MF: Thank you for your time.

MR: Thank you.