2019 · screenplay development and production-planning package · film project
War-memory feature drama linking Vukovar testimony with rigorously planned battlefield production and location logistics.
Ratna drama sjećanja o Vukovaru 1991. koja svjedočanstvo spaja s pomno isplaniranom produkcijom i logistikom bojišnice.
This project credentials: Creative production · Script & production consulting
I came onto Sesti autobus for the pre-production stretch in 2019, not the shoot. My job was the unglamorous half of filmmaking: keeping the script versions straight, sitting in the scenography, camera, SFX, stunt, and VFX meetings, pricing what could be priced, and moving the whole operation to Dubrava so the departments could work in one place.
I want to be accurate about the limits. I did not direct this, and I was not a producer on the film that reached cinemas - that was Missart, with Eduard Galic directing, and it did well: it opened Pula in 2022 and passed thirty thousand viewers. What I keep from this is the planning work itself. A war drama this exact does not get made unless someone turns the emotion on the page into a schedule, a budget line, and a location you can actually stand in. That was the part I did.
- Matija Radeljak
Sesti autobus is a war-memory drama about Vukovar in 1991 and the courtroom reckoning that followed, told partly through Olivia, a reporter whose inquiry carries the audience back across the old front line. The contribution recorded in this dossier belongs to the autumn of 2019, and it was neither writing nor directing but something quieter: turning a moving screenplay into a shoot that could actually be scheduled, priced, and executed.
The work is legible in its paper trail. Through July and August 2019 the script moved through color-coded passes - PLAVO, CRVENO, ZELENO, ROZA, then ZUTO - each one narrowing tone, character, and scene order, until the RadniFinal ZUTO package was locked on 1 October 2019 and a PLAVO2 variant followed on 9 October. Version control here was treated as production infrastructure, not housekeeping.
Around that spine sat a full pre-production system. Dated meeting reports from late August into September solved scenography, camera, stunts, SFX, VFX, and logistics in the same window: an SFX materials ceiling of five to seven thousand kuna on 1 September, line-item stunt rate cards on 3 and 8 September, and on 9 September the relocation of the whole operation - offices, workshop, storage - to Dubrava so the departments could run in sync. Location work was field-grade, not desk-bound: a Gasinci map marking access to a military training range, alongside plans for the Osijek municipal court, the Ovcara memorial, and the Vukovar hospital.
The archive is honest about its edges. There is no signed budget closure in the record, VFX vendor pricing was still pending on 10 September, and the phase worked here was pre-production, not the shoot. The film itself was completed later by Missart under director Eduard Galic - it opened the 69th Pula Film Festival in July 2022, reached cinemas on 17 November 2022, and passed 30,000 viewers - with cast from the 2019 planning, among them Marko Petric and Zala Djuric, carried through to the screen.
What this project proves is not authorship of a finished film but a specific service: production planning. Taking a heavy, historically exact war drama and building the scheduling, costing, and cross-department scaffolding a shoot of that scale needs in order to exist at all.
Related work: INTERRAIL