The film The Small Train Robbery was made in 1984 and carries the distinction of being the first postmodern action comedy in the history of Yugoslav cinema, at a time when the term “postmodernism” was still quite new in our culture.
Then 30-year-old Dejan Šorak, for whom this was a feature-film debut, though he had already built a rich career in theater, television, and radio, got the idea for the movie from a story told by his cousin about a branch of their family that everyone else disowned. The man lived in Lika, near the Plitvice Lakes, in an area marked by the Moljac and Brezovac plateaus and the well-known Šijan Gorge. Šorak also learned that members of this unpopular branch of the family had stopped two Italian military trucks two months before the uprising in Croatia that marked the beginning of the National Liberation War. Didn’t that mean those ancestors were actually the first partisan fighters? Not exactly, his cousin explained — they had been robbing anyone they could in that region for decades beforehand, and even had a tacit agreement with the authorities. They closely resembled the Uskoks of earlier centuries, who used to raid Venetian ships whenever they returned heavily laden with goods to Venice. Šorak immediately began shaping a story about a remote region where it made no difference who was the outlaw and who represented the authorities, a place where both sides cooperated in order to seize loot, and where the Western genre and Lika suddenly intertwined.
Production was handled by Jadran Film, but the young director — who managed to assemble a first-rate cast (Bata Živojinović, Miodrag Krivokapić, Mustafa Nadarević, Fabijan Šovagović…) — was offered very modest production conditions: the film was shot on 16mm cameras on Velebit, where winds reached speeds of 120 km/h. The shooting conditions were incredibly harsh, and at 2:45 p.m. a bus would arrive for most of the actors and take them back to Zagreb theaters, where they had evening performances. Early the next morning, everyone had to be back on set again.
Nevertheless, The Small Train Robbery was completed on schedule and made it to the Pula Film Festival, where it did not receive a single jury award but did win the audience prize. Later, in theaters, it attracted more viewers than many films that had won major festival awards that year. Since the movie is characterized by wildly eccentric humor and also presents an intriguing thesis about the Balkan tragicomedy in which protagonists and situations endlessly go in circles, it is no coincidence that it has remained popular to this day.
