‘Another Spring’: Sarajevo Review

Dir/scr: Mladen Kovacevic. Serbia/France/Qatar. 2022. 90 mins.

Yugoslavia’s 1972 smallpox outbreak is paradoxically made to feel both bygone and bitingly topical in Another Spring, a sober and steely found-footage documentary by Serbian writer-director Mladen Kovacevic. Playing in the documentary competition at Sarajevo the month after its well-received world premiere in Karlovy Vary, it will prove a popular festival pick — not least because of its obvious (though unstressed) parallels with the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, plus recent headlines about the shocking resurgence of polio.

The cumulative effect of Another Spring is impressive if, eventually, perhaps a little monotonous

While the feel is forensic and detached, the film is not a comprehensive overview of what would be history’s last significant smallpox outbreak — which claimed 175 lives and a decade later inspired Yugoslavian writer-director Goran Markovic’s cult 1982 horror-satire Variola Vera (the Latin name for the disease). Instead Kovacevic conveys the material through the subjective POV of a single epidemiologist who experienced the events depicted first-hand.

The copious narration takes the form of retrospective monologue reminiscences by Prof Dr Zoran Radovanovic. The visuals, however, are strictly contemporary: digitised 16mm footage, punctuated with occasional newsreel reportage and divided by short stretches of black leader. Black-and-white is the norm here, with non-monochrome interludes where the colours have taken a pinkish hue through deterioration over time. In each instance, the grisly impact of smallpox on its sufferers is harrowingly conveyed; numerous uncompromising close-ups of victims render Another Spring unsuitable for the faint-hearted.

The newsreel sections — which include spoken contributions by concerned officials — are played at standard speed. The other segments are significantly slowed down, their audio replaced by a soundtrack crafted by Jakov Munizaba which combines unobtrusively convincing foley-work with his own, ominously downbeat (and slightly overused) score. The consequence of these aesthetic and stylistic choices is to push the events depicted further back into the past, even as the audience is drawing myriad parallels with global goings-on during the last couple of years.

“The health services were well-organised,” observes Radovanovic of a programme which saw all 18 million of Yugoslavia’s population vaccinated in double-quick time. In contrast to our controversy-plagued coronavirus age, there existed no significant opposition to vaccination in what was — under the firm-but-avuncular gaze of socialist strongman Tito — an efficient European state notable for its strong communal bonds. There is also a palpable sense of the kind of selfless civic-mindedness which can often feel very thin on the ground in the 21st century; much food for thought here.

The cumulative effect of Another Spring is impressive if, eventually, perhaps a little monotonous. The impact might have been greater if Kovacevic and his editor Jelena Maksimovic (a significant talent who cuts nearly all worthwhile Serbian productions nowadays) condensed the material down to featurette length. It’s perhaps no coincidence that Kovacevic’s four pictures made in the 2010s all clock in between 56 and 63 minutes. Not everyone is cut out to make “standard”-length films — even if few can long remain immune to commercial imperatives.