Airbeletrina,
18. oktober
―
The documentary Izgubljeni Dream Team (The Lost Dream Team, 2025) by the director Jure Pavlović tells a story that seems scarcely believable from today’s perspective: in the middle of a championship, a basketball team was left without the state it was representing in the competition. In 1991, the Yugoslav team won a gold medal in Rome for a country that had already ceased to exist, as Slovenia and Croatia declared independence during the tournament.
Thirty years later, the former Yugoslav basketball stars recall one after another that, in that distant year of 1991, they considered themselves Yugoslavs and, above all, basketball players. They recount how astonished they were by the dissolution of the state at the very moment their entire focus was on the upcoming Olympic Games in Barcelona, where they were set to face the American Dream Team. Toni Kukoč, Dino Rađa, Vlade Divac, Žarko Paspalj and the other great players of what was probably the finest generation in the history of Yugoslav basketball were not alone in their surprise, although, watching the recording of Milošević’s speech at Gazimestan in 1989 in the film, we find it hard to understand.
In 1991, the Yugoslav team won a gold medal in Rome for a country that had already ceased to exist, as Slovenia and Croatia declared independence during the tournament. (Photo: from The Lost Dream Team)
Similarly, in Mila Turajlić’s documentary Druga strana svega (The Other Side of Everything, 2017), the filmmaker’s mother Srbijanka Turajlić—a renowned Serbian intellectual and tireless advocate for the democratisation of Yugoslav society—recalls her astonishment when, in the early 1990s, she witnessed huge crowds in the streets of Belgrade, waving Serbian flags and holding up images of Slobodan Milošević. “Who are these people?” Srbijanka wondered at the time. Thirty years later, she admitted that she had been totally unaware of their existence. It was only at that moment that she realised, in shock