Sveti pesak (Holy Sand). 1968. Yugoslavia. Written and directed by Miroslav Antić. With Cedomir Mihajlovic, Zelimira Zujovic, Tihomir Pleskonjic. In Serbio-Croatian with English subtitles. 83 min.
When a political commissar, now cast out from society, visits an old monument in honor of his fallen comrades, it awakens suppressed memories of his imprisonment in a hard labor camp and he begins to question his own existence. Holy Sand takes as its theme Yugoslavia’s Informbiro period, which saw the persecution of political opponents after the Tito-Stalin split of 1948, including the sentencing of more than 10,000 people to hard labor in the brutal Goli Otok prison camp off the coast of Croatia, where many were also killed. Though this period is very much a taboo subject, Miroslav Mika Antić said he made the film to speak about the revolutionary postwar era that “ate its children” and whose heroes would lose everything if they were unwilling to conform. Holy Sand was unsurprisingly ‘bunkered’ on its release, a fate it shared with many critical Black Wave films that were shelved and remained unavailable for decades. While Antić, who was only able to direct one more feature film, remained much better known to the public as a poet and painter, watching Holy Sand in a pristine new restoration means rediscovering one of the major cinematic figures of the era.