Jovan Joca Jovanović, Stanoje Čebić (RS)

KOLT 15 GAP
Kupim Otpatke Lizem Tanjire 15 Godina Aktivno Pasivno / Pobiram odpadke, ližem krožnike, 15 let, aktivno, pasivno / Will buy rubbish or lick plates, 15 years experience, active - passive
1971
–documentary short film, 24 min

Directed by: Jovan Joca Jovanović
Editing: Miodrag Milošević
Lead role: Stanoje Ćebić

The documentary short film KOLT 15 GAP (1971) – Will buy rubbish or lick plates, 15 years experience, active - passive (Kupim otpatke, ližem tanjire, 15 godina, aktivno, pasivno) was awarded at festivals in Oberhausen, Utrecht, Belgrade, and found a place in the Oberhausen Film Festival Anthology (published on the festival's 50th anniversary), while American film historian Erik Barnouw included it in his work Documentary: A History of the Non-Fiction Film, Oxford University Press, 1993.

Stanoje Ćebić (1931–2011) was a metalworker from the surroundings of Valjevo, whose activities inspired and impressed many Yugoslav artists, writers and film professionals during the seventies and eighties, but also factory workers across the Middle and Southeastern Europe region. To be able to pursue his goals, he decided for a nomadic life, detached from a life of commodities and material values.

Through his greatly successful autobiography, a kind of manifesto titled Why I became an Ox (Zašto sam postao vo, 1980), and his leading role in the short film KOLT 15 GAP, he was able to attract attention and construct the myth of a workingman, activist and artist, who worked in more than 150 factories in Yugoslavia, West Germany, Switzerland, and Belgium. The constant travels and encounters with people, otherwise inaccessible to a small-town metalworker, were able to make a marginal individual become visible. The persistence of his quest for a personal utopia has inspired a great number of very different social groups. He died - the way he lived, on a park bench - in Valjevo in 2011.

Jovan Joca Jovanovič (1940, Beograd) belongs to a group of Yugoslav directors, who started the so-called Black Wave ("Crni talas") in Yugoslavian cinematography, alongside such directors like Aleksandar Saša Petrović, Živojin Pavlović, Dušan Makavejev, Želimir Žilnik etc. His graduation feature film Izrazito ja (Especially Me), won every living award at the Young Artists Festival in New York in 1969, where the jury included Peter Bogdanovich, Steven Spielberg, Andy Warhol, and Mike Nichols, who were fascinated by Jovanovič's work, which - strangely enough - is rather reminiscent of Taxi Driver, (1976, by Martin Scorsese, who saw Jovanovič's film together with screenwriter Paul Schrader in America).

He is known as "the most frequently banned Yugoslav author", with, for example, the film Izrazito ja kept in the bunker until 1990, or Mlad i zdrav kao ruža (Young and healthy like a flower), which was 'lost' after the premiere in 1970 and was shown next time 35 years later, in 2006.

His other significant films include Revolucija koja teče (An ongoing revolution, 1972), Radni ljudi umetnici (Working men artists, 1975), Narkomani (Junkies, 1976), Čovek koji je pravio sisteme (The man who designed systems, 1990), and Vukovar zašto (Vukovar, why, 1991).