Drugi jezik na kojem je dostupan ovaj članak: Bosnian
By: Ekrem Dupanović
Week after the Weekend Media Festival passed in sorting out impressions and finishing many of the things I did not get around to do earlier, because I’ve spent almost the entire week on the road. In Rovinj I made a solid plan of what I should do when I return home in order to catch up with some things. As usual, I didn’t do anything of that, because some new commitments and jobs came around. As they always do. I started making huge cuts and I sincerely hope to keep up with it. The Media Marketing portal has become a serious project that requires constant improvements, primarily improvement of content. In September we did a few things and got a great result. In addition to the three months earlier, when we wrote about Sarajevska Pivara and Mikser House in Sarajevo, September gave us the strongest numbers yet. A couple of days ago, during an interview in Zagreb, Božo Skoko told me that the number of readers on a portal is no longer a decision-making metric for advertisers. Far more important is the portal’s relevance for its audience, and Media Marketing is the most relevant media in the advertising industry of the Adriatic region. But still, the daily number of visitors is a challenge for all of us who do this job. I have told myself a thousand times that I will not start the computer in the morning the first thing when I wake up, and still every morning, at 05.00am I break that promise. I simply have to open Google Analytics and see the visits of the previous day. And when I’m most satisfied, I immediately try to plan the content for that day so that tomorrow will have even higher numbers. For 10, 100 or 1000 visitors… It’s important to me, it motivates me, it’s what drives me.
I haven’t been to the theater in a long time. Again, the problem is time. It is very difficult to buy a theatre ticket in Sarajevo during the day for the evening of that day, because the tickets are sold out. You have to reserve your seat earlier, and that’s not something I’m good at, I never remember to do it in time. Fortunately, Asja took care about this for me, and reserved two tickets for Vedrana and me, for the play Žaba (The Frog) at the Kamerni teatar 55, while she went to the National Theater to the opening of MESS.
The Frog has been playing for ten years now, and the theater last night was once again packed full so that new chairs had been brought in before the show began. The show has toured the former Yugoslavia and Europe several times. Its popularity is so great that the movie The Frog has been filmed for which Elmir Jukić, the director of both the play and the film, recently received at the Pula Festival three golden arenas. Mustafa Nadarević once said that his life wish was to appear for at least a minute in this play.
The play was written by Dubravko Mihanović, and Emir Hadžihafizbegović, Mirsad Tuka, Aleksandar Seksan and Moamer Kasumović are actors who infused the soul into it, and who every time, for ten years now, climb the stage with incredible emotions, and get so immersed into the play that the audience feels as if the events happening before them are actually real. The Frog is a psychological drama in which the audience laughs one moment, and starts crying in the very next. I certainly am not a man who is competent to judge dramatic texts and theater plays. I’m just a spectator who can talk about his personal experience of some theater plays. And The Frog is the best play I have ever seen in life! And I will go see it many more times. Emotions that Emir and other actors infuse into it are incomparable. The audience is sitting just ten inches away from the actors and practically participates in the show. That feeling is actually what’s hardest. Actors’ emotions reach you and you slowly become a part of the story. You get the heart wrenching feeling, you feel the tears, you tremble and forget about everything around you. Emir Hadžihafizbegovic best illustrated this in a statement when he said: “People often forget to take coats from the wardrobe, they forget where they parked their car, they cry…”
Emir’s acting prowess is at its peak. The way he plays the main character, barber Zeko, could be acted – and I say this with great certainty – by a very small number if actors on this planet. He received the greatest awards for his psychologically difficult roles in the movies, but it seems to me that all of those roles were just a rehearsal for The Frog, that they served him as a preparation and a training for what was waiting for him on the stage boards, in a play directed by great Elmir Jukić. Or was it the other way round? Maybe The Frog has prepared him for big movie achievements. The audience applauded for a long, long time, and Emir, while taking his bow, was exhaling the whole time, as if he was exuding the immense energy and turmoil that he stored for the performance. That was more than obvious.
Vedrana and I, after the show, went to the nearby restaurant for dinner to let the impressions sink in, and to regain our composure after the tremendous torrent of emotions that we had just witnessed.
I reminded her of the event three or four years ago. One night Robert Čoban called. He said in three days he was organizing Hello magazine award show at Dedinje in Beograd, for prominent personalities of the public and cultural life of the region and asks me to propose an actor from Bosnia and Herzegovina. I suggested Emir and he immediately accepted it. I couldn’t guarantee anything because I didn’t know what he was doing at the time, whether he would be free that day. I called Emir immediately, it wasn’t too late – it was only half to nine. He wasn’t answering. I sent him a message to call me when he gets the chance because I have a very important message from Belgrade for him. Five minutes later, the cell phone rang. It was Emir. He almost whispers to me: “I’m at the Sava Center in Belgrade at the premiere of my new movie. What kind of important message do you have for me from Belgrade?” I laughed (God knows what he might have thought at that moment), and told him it was nothing that couldn’t wait until the morning. I called him tomorrow morning, explained to him that it would be good if he could stay in Belgrade for another two days to attend the ceremony at the Beli Dvor. He agreed and I called Robert to inform him. When it was all over, he told me that Emir was most prominent among all laureates that evening, and that his speech impressed everyone present. That’s the kind of man Emir Hadžihafizbegović is.