| By Ron Holloway Back in the days of the Cold War, when Europe was split down the middle between East and West, festival one-upmanship between the two diametrically opposed systems was common practice. One rather infamous case occurred in July of 1972, when the Czechoslovaks tangled with the Yugoslavs over the political gravity of a festival date. That's when the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (KVIFF), an "A-category" competition festival, openly trampled all over the Pula Festival of Yugoslav Feature Films, a small-time national but popular festival on the Istrian peninsula. Why the contretemps? Two reasons, as it turned out. First of all, the Cold War was in full bloom again after Alexander Dubcek's "Prague Spring" had been squashed in August of 1968 by a Soviet - pardon, Warsaw Pact - tank invasion. Only Yugoslavia had refused to play the bully during that "peaceful intervention" by Socialist Bloc neighbors. So Soviet authorities at the Goskino office in Moscow felt that the time was ripe to put the screws on a flourishing movement in Yugoslav cinematography - the celebrated "black film" wave with its hard-hitting critique of ills and corruption in socialist society that earmarked all Eastern European countries and not just Yugoslavia. What better way to do that than to nudge the Czechoslovaks to reschedule the dates of the Karlovy Vary festival, an alternating event with the Moscow film festival that traditionally took place in early July. The idea was to run KVIFF later in the same month to overlap with the dates of Pula, a celebrated festival on the Adriatic that always, and without fail, opened on July 26th. The other reason for the festival war was a cultural imbroglio. Pula planned to open with Aleksandar Petrovic's screen adaptation of Mikhail Bulgakov's classic novel Master and Margarita, an Italian-Yugoslav co-production starring Italian actor Ugo Tognazzi as Master and American actress Mimsy Farmer as Margarita. In retrospect, Aleksandar Petrovic's Master and Margarita may not score as the visual tour-de-force it was originally meant to be. Nevertheless, it does rank as one of the most important cinematic anti-Stalinist statements about hypocrisy in the Soviet system. Indeed, every intellectual in the Socialist Bloc knew that the banned novel by Mikhail Bulgakov (1891-1940) - acclaimed in Western media as one of the great novels of the 20th century - could only be read as illegal samisdat in the Soviet Union. So it was not surprising that, when the hot news reached the Karlovy Vary festival that Sasha Petrovic's screen version of Bulgakov's Master and Margarita was to open the Pula festival, I didn't hesitate to pull up stakes and head for Pula on the Adriatic. What happened at Pula made film history. As it happened, Petar Volk, the director of the Pula festival, knew he had a winner that couldn't be denied an opening-night gala screening - particularly when the festival venue, the magnificent 1st-century Vespasian Arena, comfortably seated an audience upwards of 12,000 wildly enthusiastic Yugo film buffs. All clamoring to see Sasha Petrovic's new Bulgakov film. To Tito's credit, he allowed the screening, although he didn't take that customary boat trip from his Brioni island retreat to Pula for the arena screening. Instead, he waited until the festival closed before slamming the door on the "black film" movement. Sensing trouble, Sasha Petrovic waited anxiously for supportive reviews in the Yugoslav press. Some came. But not enough. And my own praise of the film in a forthcoming Variety review didn't help much, either. Shortly thereafter, Sasha Petrovic left Belgrade for Paris. Other filmmakers in the "black film" movement - Dusan Makavejev, Zika Pavlovic, Purisa Djordjevic, Zelimir Zilnik, Vuk Babic - either emigrated or folded their creative tents altogether. Petar Volk, too, stepped down as director of the Pula festival. When the ax finally fell, the victim was not Sasha Petrovic but Lazar Stojanovic, his student at the Belgrade Film Academy. Stojanovic was thrown into prison and his debut feature film, the daring and critical Plastic Jesus, banned. As fate would have it, when Plastic Jesus was finally screened at the 1990 Montreal World Film Festival, with Lazar Stojanovic present, the film was awarded the FIPRESCI (International Critics) Prize. Checks and balances are festival fodder. As for Aleksandar Petrovic's Master and Margarita, a modest hit in Italy, it had to wait more than a decade before it could be officially screened in Yugoslavia. Today, the Grand Prix at the annual Belgrade Auteur Film Festival serves as a kind of memorial of those troubled days - it's called the Sasha Petrovic Prize. From his four decades on the festival circuit, Dr. Ronald Holloway shares a uniquely historical perspective of esteemed films, filmmakers and festivals. The three-part Festival Wars series also includes:
Goskino versus Union of Soviet Filmmakers
Moscow versus St. Petersburg | 
