Oscar-Nominated ‘The Man Who Could Not Remain Silent’ Tells Chilling Story Of What Happened Aboard Train 671 Three Decades Ago​on February 10, 2025 at 5:00 pm

In the Oscar-nominated live action short The Man Who Could Not Remain Silent, actor Goran Bogdan plays Dragan, a man facing a crucial moral choice – when he sees a grave injustice about to happen, should he stand up for what’s right, or keep quiet? The action takes place in 1993 as a train bound […]In the Oscar-nominated live action short The Man Who Could Not Remain Silent, actor Goran Bogdan plays Dragan, a man facing a crucial moral choice – when he sees a grave injustice about to happen, should he stand up for what’s right, or keep quiet? The action takes place in 1993 as a train bound   

In the Oscar-nominated live action short The Man Who Could Not Remain Silent, actor Goran Bogdan plays Dragan, a man facing a crucial moral choice – when he sees a grave injustice about to happen, should he stand up for what’s right, or keep quiet?

The action takes place in 1993 as a train bound from the Serbian capital makes its way into Bosnian territory during the civil war in the former Yugoslavia. The railcars come to a sudden stop and Serbian paramilitary troops board the train, intending to grab Bosnian Muslim passengers. Dragan, as a Christian, has nothing to worry about, but across from him sits a young Bosnian Muslim man whose life could be in great peril.

The camera keeps tight on Dragan as the heavily armed soldiers approach the compartment containing him, the Muslim man and several other passengers.

“We talked a lot about” the psychology of the character, Bogdan explained during a recent Q&A about the film. “It’s natural to hide your fear. And hiding is, I think, essential. We’re trying to be the hero until the last. And that humiliation is what interested us. That’s all of us. And I think it’s natural to hide it, try to save yourself.”

What’s shocking about the film is that it’s based on a real incident from the civil war. On February 27, 1993, near the village of Strpci, Serbian paramilitary forces did indeed board train number 671, hunting down Bosnian Muslims. They seized more than a dozen people. Of all the nearly 500 non-Muslim passengers on the train, only one man spoke up against what was happening, a former Yugoslav army officer named Tomo Buzov, an ethnic Croat and a Christian. He was “the man who could not remain silent.”

“What Tomo Bozov did is something that is worth remembering, although he ended so tragically, but it is a heroic act,” director Nebojša Slijepčević said. “But what primarily struck me with this story is the universality of this situation… It happens 30 years ago in Bosnia, but this is a situation that in a way we can identify with… [the] dilemma of witness, what to do when you witness violence that is not intended against you, so you can just look the other way. But how can you live with that if you do that?”

The director drew from primary sources as he developed the script.  

“I read more than a thousand pages of different documents of interviews with people who were on that train. I read testimonies from the trial — because one of the killers from the train was caught back in ’90s and he was put on trial. So, there were firsthand testimonies by many people who lost their relatives or were just passengers on the train. The script is fictionalized in a way; the Tomo Buzov character is real, but the other characters are not real but are inspired by real experiences of the people from the train. And most of the lines that are spoken in the film I have found in these transcripts.”

The film was shot on a train in the Croatian capital, with action carefully choreographed to make it appear to take place in a rural area.

“We’ve decided to shoot in the main train station [in Zagreb] because, honestly, it was the only possible option in Croatia,” producer Katarina Prpic explained. “Everything that you can see outside through the windows was just very planned in detail so that you cannot see the city.”

“We were filming basically on the service track of the main railroad station in Zagreb,” added producer Danijel Pek. They only had a few meters of track to work with before they had to halt the train’s motion. “In the end, all of this was enough for us to get this feeling and to really to make it believable in terms of how convincing it looks.”

For the actors, shooting on an actual decommissioned train from that era helped convey the sense of tension and constriction.

“When you are tightened in your movements, I think it gives you a sort of anxiety in your eyes because you are brought to [being an] even smaller human being… It’s practically a cage, you cannot gesticulate, you cannot even stand up,” Bogdan said. “Metaphorically, evil puts us like animals in cages and we are just lucky not to be picked up for slaughter.”

That winter day in 1993, Fikret Memovic, a 35-year-old father with two young children, was among those dragged from the train. So was Rifat Husovic, a taxi driver, aged 34. Another victim — Senad Djecevic, aged 17. Buzov told the Bosnian Muslim teenager in his compartment to remain seated; the militia seized Buzov instead. The 20 civilians removed from train 671 were transported to a nearby town where they were shot, their bodies tossed into the river Drina.

“Toma Bozo’s wife, she died a couple of years ago and she spent her life trying to find her husband because the remains of Tomo Buzov were never found,” Slijepčević said. “Then she also tried to get some justice for her husband because even today not all the killers from the train are put on trial and still it was never really clear who ordered the massacre because it might be that it was not just like the action of a group of 20 crazy ‘war dogs,’ but something much more sinister.”

The Man Who Could Not Remain Silent won the Palm d’Or for short film at the Cannes Film Festival last May. It won Best European Short at the European Film Awards, and is nominated for Best Short Film at the upcoming César Awards in France.

The director asked permission from Tomo Buzov’s son Darko to make the film. “I wrote him that we want to make a film where an actor will play the role of his father,” Slijepčević shared. “He was very generous… He offered his help, and it was very important for me. Without his permission, I’m 100 percent sure that we would not make this film.”

The live action film runs 14 minutes, about the length of time it took the actual incident to unfold. The story ends up focusing not on the man who could not remain silent, but on a man who held his tongue.

“I think that’s the braver approach,” observes Goran Bogdan, the star of the film, “because the hero died and most of us who survived are the ones who were silent or not even speaking loud enough… I love that kind of approach. There’s more mystery. It’s interesting to play because we all imagine [ourselves] as heroes until that moment when we are not.”